Saturday, October 15, 2005

Porn filtering

Lauren Weinstein complains about the new .xxx domain. His big fear is that govt agencies will induce a lot of the raunchy porn sites into moving to the .xxx domain, and then users will be able to more easily filter them out. Maybe even some school computers will be configured to block the .xxx sites.

What am I missing? Filtering is essential to use of the internet. I use spam blockers, firewalls, porn filters, and other filters. Most people do. Anything that makes filtering easier is a good thing, not a bad thing, because it gives users finer control over his experiences.

The filtering does affect my blogging a little bit. If I use a lot of vulgar or pornographic language, then the search engines will rate my blog as offensive, and it won't show up on some searches. To some bloggers, this might seem like censorship. But it seems fair to me to let users block sites that they consider offensive. If I want the widest audience for my blog, then I need to skip the offensive language.

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