3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

Eagerly anticipating the end of my contract next month.

First the network allowed everything. Then ISPs started with forbidding child porn as the one and only one exceptional rule. Then it was everything except "illegal content", being everything before with the added inclusion of copyright infringements. Then extreme porn was added, because anti-porn can always be advertised to end-users as a mechanism for protecting children. Then it is "mature content", including anything an ISP might get a letter of complain about, but which does not hurt any business partners. This meant that they can cut cost on support, but at the same time protect any revenue from advertisements. That mean items such as tor, political satire, all form of porn, unpopular religious sites and (anti)social hangouts get listed, but things like alcohol, commercials directed to children, political advertizements, violence and sexual hinting content will be left alone. After that, they start to add items to the list which competes with the ISPs' own products, such as VoIP, but also products that put a strain on their network such as video streaming. The last bans tend to be less severe, as to show how slow competing products are with their low quality of service. This also allow for a mechanism to extract levies from larger companies such as Google without going with a full blown ban that might create outcry from ones consumers.

The market won't regulate itself. There are too few options of consumers, and there exist a clear asymmetrical information gap between buyer and seller. Lemon laws for services could help here, but it would be the same effort or even more effort than to create industry regulations for ISPs.

I've always wanted to hear the voiceover in a cinema say "This film is rated for mature audiences", and have the film be a political thriller of which juveniles wouldn't understand the politics...

It's also opt-out, and although this can be done through their mobile app, it has the annoying habit of occasionally re-enabling itself. Very annoying.

So far (nearly two years) no ill effects with billing, I'm on the one plan which allows tethering YMMV.

The only gotcha I'm aware of is that bits of three infrastructure such as the MMS server and I think the "mythree" stuff don't recognise the phone anymore but thats no big deal for me. So the couple of times I've received an MMS I've changed the APN back.

You get a huge interstitial page telling you that the site is being blocked and telling you what you need to do to have it turned off.

I agree that the block should be off by default. Sellers could ask the customer if they wanted the block turned on when the phone is bought. I agree that the blocks are too broad.

T-Mobile didn't ask for any ID. I guess I'm pretty obviously over 18. They did ask for my name and address.

Just like the crappy filters you had to fight constantly at school these are extremely broad, badly curated lists of sites that they get from a third party. Three hasn't gone "let's block political and sex education sites", they just subscribe to a list made by another organisation, and often that list will mark a site as adult content purely because it has swear words on it.

It's a real issue that this stuff is blocked by default, especially when you sign up to a contract where I expect you have to be over 18 anyway!

I would like it very much if you'd block any malware sites. I don't even mind if there's a reasonable number of false positives caught in the mix when a new exploit is found and I might not have updated my software yet.

Apart from that, please don't block anything. I am an adult and the sole user of the account.