David Cameron cracks down on online pornography

One previous Labour MP tried to expense her husband watching adult movies on her cable account.

This is because it's very difficult to argue with "think of the children".

However, when we were kids, we traded pornography on floppy disks, so this solves nothing.

Actually that would make Zeffirelli's production of "The Taming of the Shrew" borderline illegal.

Along with many other respected works of art and culture.

The Anglo Saxon penchant for pruderish grandstanding combined with the British desire for an overbearing nanny state is a truly disturbing combination.

Unfortunately there are a lot of sheep on the British isles (as everywhere)

Suicide related materials actually makes some sense, depending on how extreme the censorship is. There's research (I don't have the reference handy, but it's described in Cialdini's "Influence") that estimates that in the US, each well published suicide results in an additional 48 deaths through suicides and murder-suicides, as people who are suicidal at the time appears to be more likely to go through with it in those conditions.

So if you are to censor something, suicide descriptions would be far more morally defensible to censor than porn, as to my knowledge there's little to no evidence that increased access to porn leads to increases in harm to other people.

OK, here is the difference. I know, I know - censorship generally is bad. What will they (the government) consider "harmful" next? information right? political opinion, it's book burning, this is a slippery slope ETC.

The aforementioned things do not have the consensus of psychologists and other professionals in the world agreeing that the content in question can cause psychological harm to a certain percent of society (particularly children).

That is the difference. The legal guardians of those who know that the potential is higher that their children may be affected negatively by pornography should be able to have the ability to make it harder for them to access it.

I see a lot of posts here talking about parents putting filtering software on their computer. Well, there is always easy ways around those. How many kids have iPhones today with unfettered internet access? how many kids use a public library? how many kids know computers better than their parents or grandparents and can get around any filtering software that may be installed on their home computer?

I remember the uproar at the proposition that porn content be delivered over an .xxx domain. Why was there such an uproar? How was it censorship to classify content that could be dangerous to some? Are movie ratings censorship? Are 8 year old kids legally allowed to buy tickets to NC-17 movies? It seems like the precedent had already been set.

It was all about money of course. The porn industry knows that the younger a person watches porn for the first time, the more likely they are to continue watching/purchasing porn indefinitely. The porn industry WANTS minors to view the porn. They do everything they possibly can to entice them at the earliest age possible. Does anyone think that the porn industry is high on the ethical and moral hill and would never take advantage of children to make more money?

Why should anyone outside the home have the power to do this? Why do parents have such little power and so little and ineffective tools to limit their child's exposure to pornographic material?

This is no more censorship than current laws requiring that porn mags be put on shelves a certain distance from the ground in retail stores so that 8 year old kids generally cannot reach them.