Your internet feed, let us censor it

So who really thinks giving BT et all control over what you can see on the internet is a good idea:

Four leading web providers are to offer customers the option to block adult content at the point of subscription, the BBC understands.

BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin will offer the protection for smart phones, laptops and PCs.

It comes as David Cameron is set to meet industry representatives amid concern over sexualisation of children.

The prime minister will also launch Parentport – a website to help parents complain about inappropriate content.

And he will back a ban on billboards displaying risque images near schools.

The new measures, aimed at helping parents protect their children from internet porn and other explicit sites, follow a report earlier this year by the Mothers’ Union charity.

It’s all part of the further childproving of society, where anything that potentially could be seen by children and “harm” them has to be packed off to some adults only ghetto. And the internet, being the newest, biggest and still scariest medium available to children of course has to be controlled the most. But you’d be stupid as parents to trust Sky or Virgin with making your internet feed child safe. If these filtering efforts are to be effective they have to be draconian, filtering out anything that talks about s*e*x* or mentions a naughty word — so much for Scunthorpe — and taking a lot of false positives down too. Sex education sites, rape support centres, GLBT blogs, those are all vulnerable to such filtering, because all too often already they’re blocked by net nanny software.

Either that or this sort of filter will be wholly ineffective and consist of only a token effort to block playboy.com… Remember, for these internet providers, this is just an added cost so they’ll be looking to do it as cheaply as possible.