Those ISPs mentioned are mobile phone service providers, not fixed-line home/biz ISPs, and different (but still dumb) regs apply to those. The situation needs improvement, but it isn’t as bad as I think you’re making it sound.

As already noted, it's blocked because adult content filters were imposed by the largest ISPs and mobile phone networks to avoid having the government putting legislation in place to make it mandatory.

That's surprising, thanks for mentioning it.

> I'd rather we do that than require ID to buy a SIM?

Is that really the only choice? The United States has many faults, but one can buy a phone and SIM card here without ID or proof of age, yet our ISPs typically do not filter websites.

I don't want to be all "think of the children" - but is it really a good thing that kids can go into a shop, unbeknownst to their parents, and buy a tiny, hideable device with full internet access?

I'm far from a prude, but there is a lot of really objectionable stuff on the internet that I certainly wouldn't want a 10 year old kid having access to. We're not just talking porn here.

As an adult, I have never once been inconvenienced by these filters. When signing up for a contract, you just untick the adult content filter option and get on with your day.

Some people here might defend exposing children to pornography as a good thing, but I am not one of those people.

However, blocking a ten‐year‐old from accessing the entirety of the Internet Archive simply because some of it happens to be pornographic… that’s exactly the kind of collateral damage that makes me resistant to such filters in the first place. I mean, imagine if children—presumably meaning not just young children, but “anyone under 18”—were prohibited from the adult section of a library. It seems antithetical to growth.

The problem with allowing something like the internet archive is that it lets you access a cached version of essentially any website, thus defeating the filter. Obviously a motivated kid will work that out and share it with their friends, and soon enough everyone will know about it. Same reason most adult/corporate filters block proxies.

Perhaps if archive.org offered a "safe mode" of some kind that can be activated at a network level (as Google/Bing/YouTube and others do) then it would be possible for ISPs to allow access to archive while still limiting adult content.

You can, of course, unblock your children's phone if you want, and install another filter or none at all. But I think as a default configuration it's not the worst thing in the world.

Regarding the library thing, I've not been to one in decades but I'm guessing most libraries don't have porn, snuff films and ISIS recruitment videos... but sure there is collateral damage sometimes. In school, the overly aggressive filters would sometimes stop us researching anything to do with Nazis or biology.

> Perhaps if archive.org offered a "safe mode" of some kind that can be activated at a network level (as Google/Bing/YouTube and others do)

Nobody should be making it easier to perform censorship. I wish Google/Bing/YouTube would all drop that "feature".

>but is it really a good thing that kids can go into a shop, unbeknownst to their parents, and buy a tiny, hideable device with full internet access?

It's not "a good thing" but it is far, far better than the alternative and the current restrictions.

Or we could do neither, and let parents be in charge of keeping their kids from seeing adult content.

And how do they do that if their kids buy a phone or SIM at the shop?

Can you disable the filter easily?

Takes a couple minutes if you're willing to input your credit card number (which you probably already do to top it up), or you can go into the shop with photo ID. At the moment, those are the only two ways of proving your age in the UK.