My dad enjoys the odd beer of an evening. He hates lager – always has done. Why, then, were there always cans of lager to be found in our kitchen cupboards back in the 1980s?
Perhaps it had something to do with the glamour models printed on the sides of the Tennent’s lagers cans. Who knows?
A friend of mine reliably informs me that pornography was readily available even before the creation of the Internet. I couldn’t possibly comment on that, but the saucy cans of lager are a reasonable indicator.
So what’s David Cameron up to with all this talk of setting default blocks to online pornography? Internet filters are already available for all of us to make use of. Shouldn’t parents be the ones to decide what their children, and themselves, can and can’t readily view online? The ethics of it will be debated until the cows come home.
Children need to be protected – there’s no doubt about that. But when governments start picking and choosing which material to restrict and censor on the Internet, it does set a few alarm bells ringing.
Once they begin, where will it end? One of the great things about the Internet is how much news is now reported, and how fast that news spreads around the globe – on websites, blogs and social media.
Should politicians really be controlling what information is available to the public online? I think not.
