Anyway, like all good smut there's quite a few moving parts involved here - a turf war between Ofcom and the BBFC, Tories attempting to rile up their base, and the constant jostling between the largest telcos in the UK (BT, Sky, Virgin, EE, O2, and Vodafone), with of course pressure groups on all sides throwing morsels at hacks that should probably know a lot better.
The story so far:
(This bit is very rambling even by my standards but is provided more for a bit of background flavour and to prove that none of this is new. Skip to Enter the internet for the beginnings of the current situation)Pornography legislation in the UK is a fucking trainwreck even by legislative standards in the UK. Even before the advent of the internet (hell before the advent of home videos) there was a hodgepodge of overlapping and often contrary laws. There are three main threads though - printed material is theoretically unregulated *but* if anyone can persuade a judge that a given publication is obscene then it's illegal. Filmed material is regulated by the BBFC, who can assign it a certification (the PG, 15, 18 etc we're all used to, but also R18, and this is really the crux of the current story) thereby restricting the methods and places that can be used to disseminate it, and broadcast television, which is regulated by Ofcom.
(By the way these are all really broad-strokes generalisations because there are entire law companies specialising in this shit that *still* get it wrong, like a lot)
So the R18 certificate was introduced in one of the only vaguely-sensible moves that has happened in obscenity law in the UK in the last 900 years. By giving effective immunity from prosecution under OSA for films certificated that way it at a stroke (look I promise I'm not putting these double entendres in on purpose) destroyed the organised crime monopoly on porn in the UK, something that was naturally leading to exploitation of women and murderous gang wars across the UK. (Quick aside, one of the more vicious and murderous gangs in Soho in the seventies was, naturally, the Obscene Publications Squad of the Met, and the revelations of Operation Countryman were supposedly a big part of Thatcher's Tories, of all parties, being the ones to finally loosen the collar a bit). Having said that, actual fucking was still enough to get a film refused certification until 2000
The clever(ish) bit of the R18 certificate is that under the Video Recordings Act R18 videos could only be sold from licensed sex shops - this more-or-less satisfied everyone as those licenses were assigned by local authorities and so the curtain-twitchers could ensure that no such filth would be sold on their High Street (and still jump on a train down to Soho to pick up their porn of course) and kept all of the "FILTH ON SALE AT LOCAL NEWSAGENTS" stories at bay (newsagents being the main source for video tapes back in the day), and also kept enforcement in the hands of the sex shops who were extremely strict because one wrong move and they lost their license and entire livelihood. The forerunner organisations of Ofcom - narrowly focused as they were on broadcast television and radio - didn't really care about any of this because they only had a few channels to cope with, and C4 baiting them with the occasional bit of "art" late at night aside, didn't really have to bother much with smut.
The more clever part was that the BBFC managed to get precedent established that they were responsible for all non-broadcast moving pictures in the UK. This was essential for them - their rather plush offices in Soho Square were getting harder and harder to pay for as the amount of films released plummeted with the advent of television - getting in on the video business cemented their power (and budget) for another couple of decades.
Bring on the naked Italians
This comfy arrangement lasted all of three years. Affordable satellite decoders and unencrypted European channels came on the scene in the late 80s, and if you believed only tabloid headlines (and, bizarrely, every sitcom on telly) a veritable Niagara of hardcore porn was being beamed onto our heads every single day from the dastardly continentals (and I absolutely refuse to believe that Eutelsat weren't deliberately playing up to that by calling their second-gen satellite constellation "Hotbird"). The reality was a bit more mundane of course - while Italian game shows with housewives stripping got a lot of people very, very wound up you didn't really see anything you couldn't see on Page 3, or indeed on holiday programmes (seriously - Judith Chalmers seemed to be staring at tits on some beach every single Thursday dinner time).However this of course gave the tabloid press something to get really, really wound up about. SMUT! and not just any smut - EUROPEAN SMUT! - could be had by any poor innocent child that happened to have £2,000 spare for a steerable antenna and imported decoder. Rupert Murdoch, cunning old lich that he was even then, saw his opportunity and even while The Sun called for the banning of it all (while, of course, giving extremely detailed descriptions of said smut, helpfully with pictures) he was rushing out his own satellite service. There was no regulation of such services - existing laws applied only to transmitters located in the UK, and these satellites were 30,000 miles above Africa, which made Radio Caroline look a bit unambitious. Murdoch and Sky (for it was they) dipped their toes in the water by playing fairly tame seventies softcore porn (safely 18-rated but considerably hotter than what you could get on the telly in those days). The IBA were hurriedly given the power to regulate satellite transmissions... which was pointless as of course the companies selling them were all safely registered in Luxembourg.
Seems pointless, right? Well... not really. Not quite pointless, and a conspiracy-minded person would in fact claim it was a very, very clever bit of politicking. Because at the height of the scandal, cheap scramblers were starting to come on stream. All of the providers were beginning to use them because with their miniscule viewing figures there was no real way for them to make enough money off advertising revenue, so selling the decoders became their main revenue stream. The upshot, to the non-technical, was that the IBA had saved us from untrammeled Mediterranean nookie. Murdoch, meanwhile, by blatantly manipulating the rights auction for the first Premier League season, had got his killer app for his satellite service and so quietly dropped the smut (it would return, but even to this day things stay safely 18-rated).
The IBA (after a couple of mergers, rebrands, and general pissing about) was absorbed into Ofcom at the turn of the century, and it's here where we start to get to the current situation.
Enter the internet
Ofcom was formed just at the time that the internet was beginning to go mainstream. It was in many ways the natural body to regulate this new frontier - after all it was responsible for telecommunications, and the internet was definitely comfortably in that area. However they were given no official remit to do so when they were formed. The reasons for this are murky - my personal belief is simply that they realised they just wouldn't have the technical or indeed legislative ability to do so and so didn't want to be blamed for what was on the internet.My backing for this idea is that at the time the press was - just as with the satellite business 15 years earlier - full of stories about how terrible the internet was and how Something Had To Be Done. In particular, a series of exposes in the Daily Express (strangely almost immediately after it was taken over by Richard Desmond, whose fortune came entirely from people paying money for analogue porn) and the revelations of Operation Ore (which is a rant for another day) making it seem that child pornography was no more than a click away from anyone with a modem.
David Blunkett, naturally, calmed everyone down and started a full and frank national discussion about the balance between liberty and protection and HAHAHAHA OF COURSE HE FUCKING DIDN'T. Home Secretaries are always prey to the Politicians Syllogism (Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do this) but Blunkett had his own corollary to this was "Is this something really fucking tough-sounding without actually being useful? Well do that, as hard and as fast as possible". He told the ISPs frankly - get the child porn off the internet or I'll do something about it myself, and nobody wanted to face that latter possibility as knowing him it would have been forcing everyone to apply for an ID card for every website they visited or something.
BT - who were having their own problems with Local Loop Unbundling shaking their monopoly on fixed-line provision and really seriously regretting getting out of the mobile business just as it took off - had a solution. It was called Cleanfeed, and (for a small, per-subscriber sum) they could license it to every ISP in the country, meaning they would continue to be able to make money off every single person in the UK on the internet. Unfortunately they'd shown the same level of foresight and competence as they had done to every single thing that had happened to them since privatisation though. The technical implementation was okay - not brilliant, but a clever enough solution to an otherwise insurmountable technical problem of filtering at the >1m subscribers level - but they'd not even bothered to run a trademark check and couldn't actually start selling it because there was already a mail spam filtering company by that name. In the couple of weeks while they sorted that out, every other ISP in the country had reverse-engineered it (and discovered a draft RFC that established sufficient prior art that BT couldn't do shit about it).
BT's idiocy aside, Cleanfeed-like solutions (the name stuck to the chagrin of the mail filtering company) were in place at every large ISP in the UK. This suddenly put the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a previously fairly obscure industry-funded group originally founded in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of stories about the sheer amount of child porn available on Usenet, straight into the limelight. They - as such groups tended to do - started to put the cart before the horse and look around for ways in which they could increase their power. At various times they enthusiastically offered to help ISPs filter out just about anything that was in the news at the time - cyber-stalking, extremist websites, wrong opinions on who was the best Star Trek captain - you name it.
Right I've just realised I've been typing this for an hour and nobody's paying me to do this. So I'm going to end here and take up tomorrow with the wonders of the original Digital Economy Act, Fox vs. BT, and why it's very slightly less convenient to get porn on mobile than it is on fixed line.
No comments:
Post a Comment