If you as a parent have internet in your house, its your responsibility to control your childrens access to it, not the governments. Same goes with porn or non-porn mags and DVD's.
OTOH I can understand why this might be a harder thing for parents than perhaps is acknowledged.
There are so many internet capable devices in households nowadays, including phones and games consoles etc. Sure you can try and implement some filtering but no system is bulletproof, especially when you consider P2P networks, anonymous proxies etc etc.
So I can understand the worries of parents who perhaps themselves barely understand the internet (likely their kids are much more savvy) themselves but want their children to have access to the internet as an education resource.
You might try and not allow any internet enabled device in bedrooms etc but then these days everything is an internet device and they will likely want to play games with always-on DRM etc.
This is the part I don't understand, what are those worries? What do you think it happens when a kid watchs porn? What negative consequences have been demonstrated to happen? And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I've certainly visited sites where I've been exposed randomly to porn without googling for it. Especially disguised links on forums etc.
The issue is social perception, dumbness by the masses pretending there is something evil and inmoral about watching other people have sex.
The issue is that you don't necessarily control which porn your kids would see first. And there is certainly a disproportional amount of "extreme" content available prominently.
I'm not sure it's necessarily just hysteria, I know people who would happily consume porn themselves but would be very mindful of what they expose their kids too.
Not a parent, but I think the problem with kids watching pornography is that you're basically letting a random person teach them what sex is. If a kid who's just beginning to get curious about sex stumbles on hard-core BDSM/rape fantasy sites, it's probably going to have some sort of impact. (I picked an obvious bad-case scenario, I'm not saying it's always like this, or that it'll certainly traumatize them, etc., etc. I just wouldn't want my kid's first experience with sex to be a video of a gagged woman being whipped.)
> And is not like porn randomly plays itself in the browser, you have to use explicit sexual words for Google to respond with links to porn sites.
I was going to come up with an example where little Billy is searching for his uncle Dick, but most of the results are about Dick Cheney, which is arguably more frightening than pornography.
That is certainly not the opinion of the masses because they don't want kids to see porn even years after they have been educated about sex.
If you need to hide something is gore, sites like Reddit are full of it and contrary as porn it can be a little bit traumatic.
Most porn is certainly made for commercial rather than educational purposes though and idealized stuff with giant penises and huge cumshots seems to be more commercially successful.
Effectively it's more about fantasy and than reality.
Then there are also the more extreme cases of family members renting prostitutes for young men, but I think that was much less common (though it still happens.)
That's hilariously old fashioned. Kids have smart phones.