So I've gone over the conceptual problems with a government mandated ISP based pornography filtering system and given an overview of how these systems might work. One of the problems with this kind of legislation, however, is that there are numerous technical considerations. Much like the recent SOPA bill, a pornography filtering requirement could possibly work out to be a government mandate to restructure how the internet works in the service of a specific special interest.
On the surface this seems like an overreaction, porn filters already exist so how difficult would it be for these to be implemented broadly by ISPs rather than requiring users to implement them personally. It's not, though, as scalability isn't simple. There's a reason why programs have run locally on personal machines for years but only now can be served out from a remote location to hundreds of thousands of users. There's a reason enterprise servers are different from personal computers.
Still, though, it's certainly doable. It would take a lot of work, though, and skilled programmers, network engineers, and system administrators don't work for free. That means forcing this to happen at the ISP level will be expensive. A government mandate means everyone's prices will go up. Think about if a similar resolution were to be passed for gasoline, electricity, or food. People would rightfully be incensed that either they're being forced to pay more for a service they don't want or are already using from a provider they trust and have established a good relationship.
Also, people don't often think about what their ISP is doing with their internet traffic. Usually that's because it's assumed that they shouldn't be doing anything with it apart from passing it on to the intended recipient. That's not the case, though. Your ISP is watching you, much like Google, Facebook, or other online advertising companies are and like these they plan to sell information about your habits to interested parties for some extra cash. They're also watching you as a favor to their friends in the entertainment industries to make sure that you don't "copy or share a movie, television show, or song improperly." The more I find out about the ISP industry, the less I trust them.
Knowing this we're likely to see two things happen should any sort of legislation pass from this petition: First, pornography filtering will be put in place, but thanks to a grant from the pornography industry to ISPs will make this laughably easy to circumvent. There could possibly be a sort of 'protection money' situation where ISPs block the pornography sites that don't pay up to be on their list of sites that aren't too 'extreme or hardcore.' Second, the system will be implemented with little thought to protecting those that want to avoid pornography, but as a great excuse to further other goals for the ISP.
I mentioned encrypted traffic in my last post and how this can create a problem for porn filtering systems. My feelings about ISPs give me every reason to believe that they would be happy to use porn filtering mandates to try to subvert users' efforts that are trying to remain anonymous and gain a modicum of privacy while online (such as when using a VPN service like ProXPN to hide traffic from the ISP, or connecting to a Tor node to remain anonymous). This way they could continue collecting information about you and your habits to sell to advertisers or make sure you fall in line with the entertainment industry's demands. They'd also have the power to brand anyone trying to get around these restrictions on the service they're paying for with a 'scarlet P' by saying that they had opted in to the internet with pornographic access plan.
Going back to the phrase from the petition, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn," I'm not really certain what these 'great lengths' are. Installing a free program like K9 web protection on your computer, or an app on your cell phone like this web filter? Admittedly my preferred solution, OpenDNS, is a little technical but even then you don't even need to sign up and they'll still provide straight forward instructions like these on their website. Why do we feel it necessary to have the government partner with our ISPs to do this for us? If staying safe from pornography is important to us shouldn't we be willing to put an iota of effort into doing it in a way we understand and are in control of?
This leads me back to one of my original points: naivete. I recently watched a documentary on prohibition and one thing that was pointed out was that once the prohibition amendment had passed the prohibitionists had thought they'd won the war on alcohol. Anyone with a smattering of US history knows that wasn't the case, and a tacit law saying porn is to be avoided won't make it any less desired or sought after. We'll be handing over a good degree of power over our lives, remember the internet is only becoming more and more important to who we are, in exchange for avoiding something like an hour a week, at most, to install, configure, and maintain a filtering solution that fits our personal needs.
I'm writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month in the tradition of cyberpunk. One characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is that it features technology not as an enabling force that brings about Utopian lives for mankind, but instead becomes a force for control and oppression. There's hints of this in my novel, but one of the themes is also supposed to be that this happens because people give up their rights, their strength, and their power to others because they think it's too hard to develop the technical skills necessary to understand the systems they use. Society has fallen back into being controlled by a few select elite, but this time we chose it because math, programming, physics, engineering, and computing are hard and we'd rather enjoy ourselves while someone else did those complicated things. This petition is a sad reminder that the bleak future I'm writing should be fiction, but might not be someday.
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