Replies

If someone in a given US state or locality is distributing child porn, prosecute them under the regional laws there. This could be done more efficiently and effectively than the Federal Govt. If the material is coming from overseas, local providers could block content from those domains.

"Local providers"? How many internet providers do you think there are which only service local areas? Don't bother answering, just look at the chart on this page:

ISP Usage and Market Share

Answer: none.

Ergo, this requires federal regulations. And enforcement would be no more difficult than enforcement of existing child porn and anti-SPAM laws.

If one actually thinks about this, restricting access to online porn is not difficult at all. Furthermore, it will result in the curtailing of no one's desire to view obscenity if done properly. What it will do is move the disgusting cr@p out of the view of decent people who want nothing to do with it. The internet is an online public forum that is conceptually not much different from a mall or other public place. Just as there are laws restricting people from public masturbation, there should be laws restricting the display of sex acts on the internet.

If one actually thinks about this, restricting access to online porn is not difficult at all.

Except for that part about having to hire thousands of federal employees to determine which sites are supposed to be blocked or whether it should only be certain parts of a site that are blocked, what constitutes illegal vs legal porn since as Santorum pointed out on his website, there is legal (softcore) porn and illegal (hardcore) porn.

It's cute that you think you can just flip a switch or install a filter on the internet itself, but it doesn't work that way, otherwise there wouldn't be dozens of companies who either make software or provide other services to filter the web.

Do you really want to create thousands of new federal jobs for employees to sit around determining what is legal and illegal porn?

Don't we have enough federal employees looking at porn already?

Do we really want to actually pay them to do it?

I have a solution that will spend far less taxpayer money, will prevent the creation of thousands of new federal jobs, and will not end up in all kinds of court cases that make a lot of lawyers really wealthy:

The government finds the company with the best filtering software, and pays them to provide the software for free to any American who wants it. It's got to be cheaper than hiring thousands of new federal employees who will literally be paid to look at porn and determine what's softcore (legal) and what's hardcore (illegal). Those Americans who want their internet filtered will be able to do so. Everybody else can take their chances and not rely on the government to babysit their internet experience.