Blocking Porn At The Google Or Search Engine Level Won't Work

from forbes


Tim Worstall, Contributor

David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, has a bright idea over how to deal with the menace of online porn. Just make the search engines not return a result for a list of banned words and phrases. As usual with a politician sparking the synapses this isn’t a very good idea, indeed it would be, as one writer puts it, applying a tourniquet to the First Amendment (not that the UK has one of those but you get the idea). For the problem is that language is pretty complex. It is indeed true that there are combinations of words that are used to describe certain sexual practices that we might not want the little children to see pictures of.

Well, actually, I’m not all that sure about that. I’m certain that being forced to perform in pornography is an absolutely vile thing for children to do. I agree entirely that children don’t have the capacity for consent as well. But I can’t find myself convinced that images of either grunting or groping are as dangerous to a budding psyche as the world in general seems to think. I do tend to think that humans are rather more robust that that. I’m not advocating that Two Women and a Cup replaces the bedtime story either but I am just generally unconvinced that there merest glimpse of naughty bits is going to either shock or harm children. Confuse a little perhaps, but then children are confused about many things. What harm would come from a three year old seeing a naked female torso? I suppose, dependent upon the age at which it was weaned, it might make it hungry but other than that I just can’t really see the problem.

But leave that aside and look at the actual details of what is being proposed. You put a search term into Google GOOG -0.26% and Cameron’s insistence is that if your term is naughty then Google should return no results. Which is something that Techcrunch have looked at. Apple AAPL +0.55% already has a version of this sort of filtering in Safari so they tried searching for a few things inside that. This is the list of things that they couldn’t gain access to:

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BLOCKED: “Child Pornography Prevention Programs”
BLOCKED: “Rick Santorum”
BLOCKED: “Weiner Sex Scandal”
BLOCKED: “TechCrunch.com”
BLOCKED: “Dick Costolo” (CEO of Twitter)
BLOCKED: “Jefferson sex with slaves”
BLOCKED: “Tumblr’s porn problem”
BLOCKED: “Sexual reconstructive surgery”
BLOCKED: “How to tell my boyfriend I don’t want to have sex”
BLOCKED: “How to put on a condom”
BLOCKED: “Pussy Riot”
BLOCKED: “Adult Film Industry and expansion of broadband“

I think that second one is very funny indeed, for of course Santorum has done nothing at all, it’s the deliberate attempt by Dan Savage to lampoon him by associating the name with a particular sexual output that has led to that blocking. So is the first actually: trying to rid the internet of child porn could be said to be a noble goal: but if you at the same time block child access to what to do about it then you might be over reaching.

The basic problem is, as I say up top, that language is complex. We use words in combination, they can have varying meanings in themselves and the same phrases can be used in entirely different circumstances. Which means that to truly bock access to porn itself you’ve got to block just about anything and everything that could possibly be referring to something sexual. Which, for a mammalian species like us, where so much of what we do is ultimately about sex and the pursuit of it, means that to filter out the porn you’ve got to filter out most of the internet. Or, as they say:

The (very) savvy engineers at Apple have already discovered that you have to apply a tourniquet to the First Amendment to effectively block children from seeing naughty pictures.

It just doesn’t seem like a useful solution, does it
?