This will happen.
In 2008, The Finnish police have added Finnish hacker Matti Nikki's website criticizing Internet censorship to Finland’s new national child porn filter.The scan also found that the top three results of a Google search for "gay porn" are blacklisted. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Finnish_internet_censorship_crit...
In Sweden in 2007, the child porn filter also blocked the Korean Bonsai Association. Far worse than Bonsai trees, the porn filter was also used to block a political web site over a Mohammad cartoon that enraged muslims. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4700414.stm
What political web sites are blocked the child porn filter today? We have no way to tell.
Slippery slope, indeed.
The official response? We will consider adding wikileaks to the list of banned sites, for some reason this was never accepted.
It was however leaked in 2008 with a date of February 2008: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship...
And as you can tell, it contains many more sites than the official document, including a Dutch bus rental service.
They're building all the tools of a police state. With the best of intentions, mind you. But it's not them we're afraid of (we might dislike having to opt in/out of porn, but that's merely a nuisance) - with some luck they'll get voted out in a few years time.
What at least some of us are afraid of is that some day down the line someone else gets into power who decides to take full advantage of all the nice tools their predecessors have given them. Put all the tools in place, and that someone might even be more inclined to seek power, knowing the power can extended all that much easier.
This whole issue is not about porn.
Why is making legal hardcore pornography opt-in a big deal? So many reasons. First, because there's nothing wrong with it and it's something a good many of ordinary people enjoy. Second, despite the previous, in many societies it's still not considered a socially acceptable think to admit to liking even though almost everyone does, so people are far less likely to speak up in a manner that identifies them in order to protest it. Third, some of the actually banned (and not just filtered) content is rape fantasy, which is a hugely popular fantasy among women, and many object to its being banned. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, making it opt-in is a big deal because it takes a freedom and weakens it. If we have to ask the government for permission to do something, it's not a freedom, it's something being allowed by government for now, and they can change it whenever they want. This is the same reason people advocate open source tools and non-proprietary protocols—so we have our own freedom of choice and can avoid being locked into the whims of whoever holds the power. Porn is an easy place for them to start, because large subsets of society won't speak out in defense of porn, but I guarantee if this sort of filter remains in place long-term, it will be used to block more than porn. That may not even be their intent right now, but when you have a massive internet filtration system in place, it makes it extremely easy to justify adding in a few more filters blocking sites troublesome to the government in a few years.
Such unfortunate phrasing...I think making any kind of porn is currently opt-in.
Children in the UK see softcore porn in corner stores every day - eye-level newspapers display models wearing thongs with the camera zoomed in to their ass crack on their covers, and there's a bare breasted woman inside.
1. I'm just stating what the common definition is. 2. I personally don't even believe in this distinction at all, however my views are not common. 3. Conservative muslims would probably share the same distinction, but argue that all pornography, 'hardcore' or 'softcore', is immoral.