Last night on Lateline there was (finally) a story about the current government’s plan to introduce a mandatory, ISP-level Internet filter. I don’t need to expand on why this is such a bad idea – there has been plenty written about it. Right now it’s only a subset of the government and a few wowsers that support the idea; the rest of the country vehemently opposes it for a host of reasons. If you want to learn more about the issue, a good place to start is the numerous discussion threads about it in the Whirlpool Broadband forum.

Anyway, the story on Lateline (read the transcript here) included some vox-pops from a suburban mum who supported the idea of the filter to “protect” her daughter online. Her words:

It's a gamble as to what can come up. That some of the images that can freely pop up on the internet without protection are exploitive, you know, there may be non-consensual sex.

I couldn’t agree more! I hate when I’m using the Internet, innocently searching Google for, say, lambda based inversion of control containers, and suddenly an image of violent rape pops up in front of me! This seems to happen all the time! I imagine the problem is even worse when you’re looking at sites about Spongebob Squarepants or Ben 10!

Seriously though – it’s amazing how often you hear about this supposed problem from people who never actually access the Internet. What kind of sites are people visiting that are showing them random pop-ups of non-consensual, exploitative sex? I’ve been using the Internet since before there was a web (as have most of my readers, I assume) and I’ve never “stumbled upon” this sort of content.