SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

I'm on this week's episode of CBC Radio's Spark, talking about net neutrality. If you want to have a listen, that stuff starts at about the 49:27 mark. We're discussing the events of the past week down in the United States, where the regulating body - the Federal Communications Commission - announced it will enshrine net neutrality principles as law.

The FCC's move comes at a time when our own telecommunications regulator, the CRTC, is mulling whether it should recommend new rules here in Canada. The CRTC held hearings this past summer, attracting an unprecedented level of interest from the public. With the United States moving towards adopting new rules that will prohibit internet service providers (including cellphone carriers) from unfairly interfering with their customers' traffic, the pressure is on the CRTC - the regulator is supposed to announce its opinions some time this fall. Some have argued that our telecom laws are already strong enough - others have suggested that Telus's blocking of access to a union website a few years ago and the ongoing situation with Bell throttling peer-to-peer file sharing are just two examples that our laws are too lax.

Ultimately, the power and decisions rest with the government, and it's here that Canada and the United States couldn't be further apart. President Obama immediately voiced support for the FCC's plan, but in Canada, the Conservative government is the only party that has not voiced explicit support for net neutrality. The best we have is this statement in the House of Commons last year from former Minister of Industry Jim Prentice:



I bring up net neutrality here not only because of my personal interest in the issue, but also because it has significant implications on pornography. Invariably, the first sort of content that internet providers and governments alike target for blocking is porn. I've written on numerous examples of this, from China to the United Kingdom to India to Australia.

Personally, I take a pretty hard line on this - if the material, regardless of what it is, is legal within a country, adults should not be blocked from accessing it online in any way, shape or form. In other words, if you can buy a Vivid DVD down at the local sex shop, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get it online too.

Porn producers feel the same way, so they're generally big supporters of net neutrality.

There is one big problem, though: it's ridiculously easy for anyone - children included - to get access to porn online. If you go to any number of porn sites, you're simply asked to verify that you're over 18. Click a button and you're in. In the case of the plethora of YouTube porn clones out there, you've got instant access to a veritable cornucopia of porn video, all for free.

I've yet to hear a decent explanation as to how this has been allowed to happen. I remember in the early days of the web, there were a number of adult verification services out there and you generally couldn't get easy access to such sites without a credit card. Somehow over the years, that's gone out the window and now it's like the wild west. I imagine that competition and piracy pushed producers to offer more and more of their stuff up for free, without age verification, and nobody stepped up to police them. As many countries have found, it's just easier to block them all outright.

If net neutrality is to apply to porn companies, to where ISPs in developed countries such as the U.K. and Australia don't try to block access, they're going to need to come up with a solution to this problem. Otherwise, they're going to continue to get targeted no matter what kind of neutrality rules are in place.