Jillian C York is worried about proposed web filtering in the UK, and she thinks you should be too.

Personally, I’m fairly agnostic about pornography. I certainly wouldn’t miss it, and if I did, I know plenty of ways to get around Internet filters (which is another point: if you block porn, are you going to block circumvention tools too?). So for me, this isn’t about pornography, but rather, about the systems in place to block it. I don’t trust them. Nor do I have any reason to.

York compares the current guardians of the web in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation, to America’s MPAA, which handles film classification:

The MPAA is a perfect comparison to the IWF: two nongovernmental bodies comprised of regular (often untrained, often uneducated) people making decisions for the rest of us. You should be very uncomfortable with this, whether you care about porn or not.

There is a fundamental issue of what constitutes “pornography”. UK law currently operates on a “know it when I see it” basis: which is probably about right: after all, people get their kicks in various, and varyingly odd, ways.

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