Blaming 3G for porn
Wednesday
Dec 28, 2005
The good Philippine Congressman Joseph Santiago is at it again. He blamed broadband for porn proliferation. Now he’s worried that 3G (third-generation mobile technology) will bring about more porn, this time over the mobile networks.
The advance of broadband or high-speed Internet access, coupled with the coming of 3G mobile telecommunications technology, will surely open the floodgates to the cell phone delivery of pornography.
Dude, you must accept the fact that whenever you have access to a web-enabled computer or mobile terminal, you are sure to be able to access porn if you wanted to.
But I agree that it’s good to have a content-rating system.
The lawmaker suggested that NTC adopt a content-rating systems for audio and video materials delivered over cell phones. “Either this or mobile telephone operators themselves initiate their own content-rating systems,” he added.
But–yes, another but–even if you had content-rating systems for the content delivered by the telcos, you would need to have mobile phone support for such to work. And I doubt that Philippine laws can influence, much less force, the mobile phone producers to implement this across their mobile offerings. And still, if you have open WAP access with any compatible mobile, you can just go over to wap.google.com, key in some porn-related keywords, and voila, you’ve got porn!
Good intentions. But it’s either Mr. Santiago’s staff isn’t doing proper research, or he’s just grandstanding to get the conservative citizens’ support. Reminds me of the .XXX top-level-domain debate, wherein the “conservative” groups strongly lobbied against the creation of .XXX for porn sites, sort of like the red light district of the Internet. John C. Dvorak puts it so well in his December 5, 2005 PC Magazine Article:
Exactly how these folks [religious and women’s groups] became enamored of resisting the .xxx domain is somewhat mysterious, and I suspect the pornographers themselves are behind it. These women have been tricked. Who benefits from the death of .xxx? The pornographers, that’s who.
…
Concerned Women for America claims that the .xxx domain will increase porn by giving the pornographers a “new platform.” What? Can someone tell me exactly how this creates a new platform? Don’t these people understand how a ghetto works? Do they know what a platform is?
At any rate, IMHO, Mr. Santiago’s proposals just won’t work. We live in a world where pornography is a driver of technological innovation. I’m not saying that porn is good (alright, the guys over at the Man Blog would most likely have an opposing view), but it’s a fact that where there’s access to multimedia, then porn is also easily available.
Why don’t we focus our energies on properly educating the people we intend to keep away from this stuff (our kids) instead? Now that’s a longer-term solution!
J. Angelo Racoma is a technology journalist and blogger. See more of his blog posts here at racoma.com.ph, commentaries at racoma.net, and Twitter feed at @jangelo.
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