One of the internet’s most awe-inducing features is its ability to serve up whatever piece of content you need, whenever you need it. Whether you’re looking for videos of cats riding Roombas, the translated poetry of Goethe or the song of a nightingale, the internet, thanks to the incredible resources of the world wide web, will dish up whatever you’re after. Of course, insofar as online content mirrors our offline imperfections, it’s equally easy to find less salubrious material. As with many other technologies before it, the internet has provided a new platform for pornographic content, and whatever your sexual predilections, you will find an ample store of online content to meet every desire.
Unsurprisingly, this leads to no small degree of social and political concern, and the UK is currently engaged in an emotive debate as to how best we might balance individual rights to protection from legal but ‘harmful’ online content against rights to sexual freedom and freedom of information or expression. What makes this issue even more controversial is the rather unhelpful tendency of both politicians and media to portray the conflict as one between children’s rights to protection, and adults’ rights to consume pornography. Since 2011 the UK government has sought to drive through a policy of household-level internet filtering, whereby individuals or families signing up to new broadband contracts would be required to either accept default filtering of online content or explicitly opt in to receive adult material. Announcing the roll-out of such measures in 2013, David Cameron argued, ‘this is, quite simply, about how we protect our children and their innocence’. Put this way, it’s hard to see how anyone could disagree with the premise of filtering out pornographic and other adult content from home internet connections. Unfortunately, the matter is not quite so clear-cut.
