UK plans age verification for porn websites from 2018

When I was a teenager there always were a few used mags that we swapped or gave each other. If kids have smartphones, they'll resort to video sharing, and there are few ways to avoid it.

I'm not sure that's a good way to spend the taxpayer money.

This sounds silly, but the existing situation is also silly. Kids aren't allowed to go to pornographic movies in cinemas. What's the point of those restrictions, which people have been happy with for probably 100 years, when they are allowed to do all that online?

It sounds like the law should be harmonized one way or another - open everything up or close everything down, otherwise it's pointless.

This is an awful piece of legislation and will pretty inevitably produce dangerous side effects whilst not in any way meeting its goals. It's a shame to see this kind of uninformed law get introduced in a supposedly advanced country.

It won't meet its aims as the targets (teenagers) are well aware of how to geo-shift their access using Proxies and VPNs and also it doesn't (AFAIK) cover non-commercial sites, so imgur, reddit etc don't count and they've got a load of porn for anyone who spends more than about 5 seconds looking.

On the flip-side there are significant downsides here. One UK adults will need to give their identifying details to commercial sites if they want access. In some cases those adults will not want it publicly known that they use those sites.

When they inevitably get hacked, we'll have an Ashley Madison style problem again with the possibility for blackmail as a result.

Also I'd imagine even more sites will mirror the content of the commercial porn sites and these less reputable sites have a rep. for hosting malware, so we'll likely see more devices gettting infected...

So far from coverage I've seen on the "mainstream" UK media, none of these issues gets a mention...

This has probably very little to do with porn and is most likely the first step in the UK's government attempt to track more closely who is accessing what on the internet and even have the power to blacklist and make inaccessible areas of the internet they deem inappropriate or inconvenient.

The enforceability of this is hugely questionable (they have heard of VPN right?) and the societal benefit of less porn is also hard to quantify asaik. Porn is not like hard drug use, cancer or drinking-and-driving where there is a definite and significant cost to society in terms of measurable harm etc.

The UK has a lot of issues to address currently with Brexit looming, so focusing on porn could also be a 'clever; political distraction from the pending mess Brexit is shaping up to be.

In a weird way it may be a good thing to teach our offspring how to deal with and work around censorship on a small, non-political scale. Also, this topic assures they learn the lesson thoroughly, both because a lot of self-interest (unlike with 'boring' politics) and because of the obvious stupidity of this censorship.