This move is all but guaranteed to be one of the least-successful online crowdsourcing efforts we’ve ever seen. A Greenbrae, Calif., man has started a petition on whitehouse.gov demanding that the government automatically block online porn, making it available only to those who “opt in” for access with their Internet service providers.
This might sound familiar to anyone in the U.K.
“We are asking for greater protection and responsibility from Internet Service providers and our country,” writes the author of the petition, who goes by the initials “M.G.”:
We are asking that people who are interested in porn should have to seek it and choose it. They should have to “Opt In” for it by making arrangements to receive it with their Internet Service Provider.
The petition is clearly inspired by British prime minister David Cameron, who announced his intentions to launch a similar plan—an “opt-in” measure for British Internet users—earlier this year. Expected to be widely implemented by late 2014, the plan requires that all new broadband accounts be automatically equipped with family-friendly filters. Access to pornography would only be available to those who had specifically requested it, or “opted in.”
Cameron’s “opt-in” measure is part of a wider initiative to police “poisonous” online pornography, which the prime minister has said “corrodes childhood.” Although the measure is ostensibly targeted at child pornography and extreme images that depict brutality against women, it’s been heavily criticized by Internet-privacy and free-speech advocates, who deride it for being misguided, ineffective, and just plain silly (one U.K. porn enthusiast devised a particularly ingenious alternative to Cameron’s opt-in plan, creating a filter that automatically blocks non-pornographic material).
Apparently, the folks on We the People agree with Cameron’s critics. The U.S. “opt-in” petition has received a paltry 4,330 signatures, a far cry from the 100,000 required for the petition to be sent to the White House for consideration.
Too bad, M.G. Guess you should go back to putting duct tape on your MacBook screen and penning angry letters to the FCC about Miley Cyrus.
H/T We the People/AVN | Photo via Marsmettin Tallahassee/Flickr
