I bet you think I’m making this one up don’t you?  Well, sadly, hot on the heels of the current proposed legislation enabling further Government snooping of our communications comes this little cherry, as detailed in The Register.

The proposed Online Safety Bill if passed into law would place a duty on ISPs and cellphone network operators that provide you with a means of getting online that would require that access to any service that provides pornographic images is blocked as standard.  If you wanted to access your daily dose of internet porn you’ll need to contact your ISP and cellphone operator, be over 18, be able to prove it and “Opt In”.

Hands up who’s going to phone up? I can’t wait until we get our first phone call.  Stop giggling at the back there…

On a serious note, what we’re talking about is country wide filtering of internet access.  Hmmm, so what do they plan to filter next I wonder?

Given that they government already want to start monitoring what we look at and who we communciate with, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that once profiles are built up, they can block access to things to other thing’s they don’t want us to see.  I don’t know about you but I’m not a fan of that idea.

Niether are the Internet Service Providers Accociation, who feel that it’s down to parents to manage their childrens internet access using the tools that are already available (read The Register article for their quote) by which I would imagine they mean software filtering that you can install and hardware filtering that many DSL / Cable routers include as standard.

EIther way, filtering?  I know we’ve got to protect our kids, hell I have two of my own and as you can imagine growing up in my household the internet is everywhere.  We managed OK.  I don’t think I ever saw a traumatised child (well – except when I legged it to the bathroom in the middle of the night) and now they are older I don’t think we have any perverts in the house (I exclude myself).

Nanny state  – or is it all part of a bigger plan?

The slope just keeps getting slippier..

Phil..