You will by crying censorship the most if the US gov't took down all conservative sites.
Gov't should not be blocking any site unless it is child porn etc
Can't believe conservatives cheering a gov't blocking the internet
@Oceander
Political speech is a core freedom, and a freedom that is fundamental to self-government. Pornography is not quite so valuable.
To be fair, I was being more tongue-in-cheek (no puns please!) than not. I agree that government shouldn't be in the business of censoring speech, and that this means that pornography gets to shelter under the penumbra of free political speech.
With respect to child pornography, the approach shouldn't be to block the website - good luck with that, those things are slippery and slimy - but to prosecute for the underlying crime of producing child pornography and possessing/spreading it - the latter two being necessary concomitants to production - and the same goes for adult pornography in the sense that if one or more of the persons in the pic/vid did not fully and voluntarily consent, then the production and possession/spreading should be illegal.
As far as pornography sites in general go, however, I would support laws that require far stronger protections to prevent children from accessing pornography online to the extent possible. To start with, no more freebie "teasers" to try and get someone to sign up and pay to access a porn website. And signups should require something more than the signer-upper promising that they're 18 or older. At the least, I would suggest that a porn website must require a valid credit card for a sign-up, that there be a mandatory 1-cent charge made on the card (which could be refunded, if desired), which the credit card companies must process, even if the card is over the limit, and which the credit card companies must highlight on the account statements.
I can tell you from some bitter experience a friend had, that it is all too easy for children to accidentally wander across pornography without even looking for it. If an 11 y.o. googles "spanking" on Mom's smartphone because they overheard a parent in the grocery store threatening to spank another child for grabbing stuff off the shelves, that 11 y.o. is going to come across the hardcore stuff pretty quickly. And once one has found it, it can spread quickly amongst their peers. Long, long gone are the days when the hardest porn most kids ever saw was the soft-core stuff in Dad's playboy magazine (heck, even hustler was pretty tame compared to what's available now).
My suggestions wouldn't censor that stuff - adults with credit cards, even cards over the limit, could still view the stuff to their hearts' (and other parts') content - and it wouldn't keep every child out, but it would (a) keep most kids out - the kids who got in would have to work really hard at it - (b) make it harder to spread around amongst peers, and (c) give parents some immediate warning if their kid tries to use their credit card to access a porn site.
Defining what sites would be covered would be difficult, I freely admit, but to start with, those sites that display the federal notice that they are in compliance with federal law banning sexual performances by minors should be covered by this sort of rule. I'm mainly aiming for the really hard core stuff, for which there really isn't even a figleaf of educational or other non-prurient interest. That kids might get a hold of a sex-ed textbook online is a risk that is not, in my mind, so great that it should be covered by my suggested limits; after all, they'll see that sort of stuff in sex-ed class anyways. And that kids of tender years might see nudie art is something else that is not such a great risk that their access to it has to be tightly controlled.
