Do you agree

[Sandra]

[6sailor9]

  NO!!

[Slivers]

No, is that a real proposal? Why?

[Sandra]

No, is that a real proposal? Why?

About eighteen months ago, in London, yours truly had separate lunch meetings with two people who had been prominent in the pre-2020 election campaign to introduce age restrictions onto porn sites in the United Kingdom, which had, by that stage, failed. Both of them had the same sorry tale of woe to tell when the topic came up in conversation.

They had been confident enough to start with:
Restricting access to pornography is popular, and polls well with the public, and with women who are mothers in particular. Most of the very biggest porn sites – Pornhub, et al – are sufficiently large and well known to make regulation achievable.
Further, the specific proposal to make people upload photos of passports or driving licences would, they felt, both accomplish their primary aim of protecting children, and a secondary aim of reducing porn consumption amongst men by making people worry about the consequences for their lives and careers in the event of a data breach from big porn sites.
"If this had been enacted", one of them said, "it would have been the biggest blow struck against pornography in two generations".

It was not, however, enacted. The reasons for that, they both said, were twofold.

One of them noted for example that the opinion polling was deeply unreliable: People were telling pollsters that they supported the proposal, but in more detailed focus group research, men who were planning to vote conservative mysteriously shifted towards Labour or the Liberal Democrats in large numbers once they became aware of the fact that regulating pornography was a proposal identified with Tories.
Often, these men would find another reason for shifting their vote, but the pattern was clear enough: Once they heard about the idea, their vote shifted, even as they protested that the proposal had nothing to do with their vote shifting and it was all really about tax bands or something else.

This, reputedly, led a very senior Tory Politician to say that he was not going to run for election telling British men that he would take away their porn.

The second reason the proposal ran into difficulty was its assessed unworkability.

Pornography, the UK Government apparently concluded, is no longer simply confined to "porn sites". Websites on which pornographic material can now be openly accessed include widely-used sites like twitter, reddit, and various image boards, as well as servers on discord, pages on Telegram, and a million other potential sources.
To completely block off all access to pornography, it might have been necessary to force people to give their details to websites that they were using for entirely innocent purposes.
Telling a middle-aged mother that she has to give her passport to Elon Musk because there are pornographic accounts on twitter would not have been popular, or workable.

Further, there were obvious issues about enforceability and security: A country specific regulation is relatively easily circumvented, in the internet age, with the use of a proxy server. In many cases, kids these days are as internet-literate, if not more internet literate, than the people trying to restrict their access to various websites. The ban could have been relatively easily avoided by many people.

Third, there was the security issue: Compelling tens of thousands of people, who were doing nothing illegal, to hand their details over to pornographers was an enormous security and data protection risk. "The politicians concluded", one of my lunchmates told me, "that they'd get the blame if and when some vicar's passport ended up in the hands of Russian blackmailers, alongside those of hundreds of thousands of other Britons".

In Ireland, of course, the proposal to enact basically the same law that Britain rejected is not being driven by politicians: It is being driven by an unelectable (and unremovable by voters) body: Comisiún na Meán. That, aside from being entirely undemocratic, has the benefit of providing politicians with some insulation from political consequences. Irish politicians will be able to do their favourite thing: Supporting a policy (in this case "protecting children") in principle, while having zero responsibility for any practical problems that might arise.

At this stage, I will grant that the policy in question, and the principle behind it – restricting access to porn – will be popular with a great many readers.

As a matter of pure principle, it is popular with me, as well: The huge impact porn is having on young people's views of sexuality and each other in particular is a real societal problem that must be addressed. However, process matters.

In this case, we have a state agency with executive power which proposes to introduce a draconian and expansive new regulation without the need for any political debate or political scrutiny, which means that all of the practical problems identified when the UK sought to introduce a similar law may not get a hearing on this side of the Irish sea. Further, the restrictions on basic freedoms involved in enacting these regulations are not minor: We're talking about forcing people to hand over personal information in order to engage in what will remain a perfectly legal activity.
And we are talking about doing so with only the smallest veneer of democratic oversight. If this was a regulation being enacted this same way that you didn't support, then you would be rightly outraged.

Comisiún na Meán has only existed for a week. For its first action to be such a sweeping and draconian exercise of its powers would be a very troubling sign.
After all, first it's porn. Then it will be you're forced to hand over your details to read certain news sites or access certain social media platforms.

After all, misinformation is also harmful to children, is it not? We should not set precedents we will soon come to regret.

[Slivers]

What a bizar story, glad it wasn't enforced. And glad I live in the Netherlands.