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Comment by paperpunk | Hacker News Reader

I worry this will just funnel kids onto the kinds of porn web-sites that are unlikely to follow government regulations anyway, as they might have more damaging content.

Are there any cases where something like this has been rolled out elsewhere where the effects can be looked at?

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Alternatively they'll (continue to) go to Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc - the sort of sites that this law will have no impact on.

Now that you mention it, pretty much every website with user content has porn on it. So this regulation will either ban those as well, or cause people watching "professional Hollywood porn" to instead watch user-generated porn, which doesn't solve the problem the regulation is trying to solve at all.

As a small website owner (not a porn website owner though), I really don't care if a country blocks my website because of silly censorship laws. Sure, it hurts finances a bit, but if a government truly represents the people (yeah right), then the people don't want to see my website anyway, right?! I wonder if larger websites like Reddit, forum boards, and file hosting sites will follow this same attitude.

Likely this will be implemented at the ISP level, I expect 99.99 of the sites would not care otherwise.

You still cannot effectively block every adult site even at an ISP level. There will always be smaller sites on the fringe that get missed.

It's basically the same problem as preventing online piracy.

And honestly - I suspect this will have the bigger effect of encouraging actual porn piracy instead of porn streaming. Wonderful way to re-introduce the popularity of a porn collection.

They don't need to block 100% of all sites for it to be effective. It's the same with the lock on your home, the password on your phone, the lack of a fence or wall along the length of the border. It's "good enough".

I think you're underestimating the determination kids have for accessing content they are told they can't have.

"good enough" here isn't good enough.

I'm going to draw parallels with online piracy again, where countless DRM and legal (both through legislation and litigation) efforts are made to curb piracy yet rarely make a dent on the numbers of people who access copyrighted content illegally via one means or another.

I confirm, their mobile blocking in the UK does not work very well, sometimes it also even blocks non-porn websites randomly.

Off topic but if you're using Three I suggest you use the "3internet" APN - it has no effect on billing but you bypass any filters and get a direct connection with your own IP address (no NAT) and no filtering proxy in between.

Oh, that's good to know, I will use that now! Thank you!

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