Remember the awkward conversation you had with whoever controls your Wi-Fi router – your flatmate, your landlord, your mum – when porn became an opt-in function on your internet connection? Well, David Cameron’s about to have a similarly awkward conversation with pornographers.
Because the PM has decided that anyone running a porn site can only run that site if they make it impossible for under-18s to watch it. While many among us might lie about their age when accessing a porn site, simply because it’s too fiddly to enter in all of the specific dates on the drop-down menu, kids much younger than us are watching porn, too.
Cameron says that unless porn sites can put up age verification tools (really properly good ones, not just a drop-down menu asking you to lie), then he’ll bring in laws insisting on them.
He explained to The Sun, a family paper that, up until this year, featured naked boobs on its third page, that he’s ‘working hard to make the internet a safer place for children.’
He said: ‘The next step is to curb access to harmful pornographic content which is far too widely available.’
He says he’ll also hold service providers, such as Virgin, TalkTalk and BT to account, and a consultation this autumn will look at all the options.
The problem with this is that – think of how many different porn sites there are. If all of them have to comply with every single rule in every single country, then... that’s a lot of work on their hands.
Plus, how do people confirm their age on porn sites? Passport numbers? Facial recognition? Debit card numbers?
Some of us feel that porn is such a right, we should be able to get away with watching it as anonymously as possible, right? It’ll be hard for these rules – if they’re brought in – to not be met with some disapproval.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.