Preventing your children from seeing obscene content is fine.
Deciding that other people are too stupid to be able to do this, and thus those other people need a government mandated filter at the ISP to filter adult content is perhaps a bit authoritarian.
Don't forget that UK mobile providers already filter adult content (T-Mobile have something called "Content lock" - you need to go to the shop with ID to prove age to have it switched off. O2 and the others have something similar.)
And the UK has the Internet Watch Foundation - a quango that has the power to request that ISPs filter some pages and images.
I don't know what the answer to protecting people from extreme imagery is, but I do know a government filter isn't it.
I guess we disagree then. I believe protecting children is partly the responsibility of the government, and the level of protection a child receives, shouldn't be dependent upon the technical proficiency of their parents.
> I believe protecting children is partly the responsibility of the government,
While this is noble, what happens when I as a parent disagree with what the government thinks my child needs to be protected from?
Another thing, where the hell are the parents in all of this? If the kid is young enough to need protection from many things on the internet, that same kid shouldn't be surfing the internet unsupervised!
> Deciding that other people are too stupid to be able to do this, and thus those other people need a government mandated filter at the ISP to filter adult content is perhaps a bit authoritarian.
How is it 'authoritarian'? The motivation here is clearly to make it easy and therefore usable, rather than difficult and therefore unusable.
> I don't know what the answer to protecting people from extreme imagery is, but I do know a government filter isn't it.
How do you know that it isn't it? It seems to me that you've started from the axiom that it isn't it and come to no conclusions whatsoever.
Of course it is. You may think that the parent-child relationship is a place where authoritarianism is a very good idea, but that doesn't change the word used for the basic power structure involved.
Not at all, as long as you as the parent decides what can and can not be viewed by your children. What is authoritarian though is the government deciding that for you and imposing that nation wide.
This is an old argument but: most internet filters only filter for smut and not violence. I'd challenge the notion that using such a filter is at all an effective tool for filtering the obscene.
Clearly, it's not the intent - or at least, not the publically professed intent - that's the problem, but the notion that instead of downloading and installing filters, it's simpler to just turn off the internet.
It's like when using contraception is too difficult for some people - so let's outlaw non-procreational sex entirely.