March 21, 2007

Obvious, doable

Here's a family friendly policy for Mitt Romney to flesh out:

Utah's governor and state legislature has lent its weight to efforts to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring adult content providers to stay off port 80, which generally carries HTTP web surfing traffic......

Censorware, or internet-filtering software, is supposed to achieve the same results. But port-exile advocates say their way of blocking internet porn is better.

The technical obstacles to implement CP80 are considerable, and the scheme calls for an arbiter of public taste (i.e. a censor) to decide what kind of content is fit for inclusion of the mainstream internet. The difficulties of getting the .xxx top level domain established also point to another set of potential problems.

Supporters of Internet Community Ports Act argue that the approach preserves all current URLs and current naming conventions, unlike the .xxx top level domain plan.


I'd deal with the censorship issue by first making the scheme voluntary. My guess is that would knock out 75-95% of salacious websites from inadvertent viewing. If there's still a severe residual problem, sure consider 'censorship', but it really isn't censorship if adults are free to access it. It's child protection. If we can forbid plying children with legal drugs, we can forbid sliming them with porn.