PARIS — A member of the French Parliament last week asked the government to introduce a measure countrywide that would automatically block porn sites unless users opt-in and manually enter an “access code.”
MP Jean-Jacques Candelier of the Democratic and Republican Left, saying that he's had enough of the "scourge" of freely available online porn, delivered a letter to Laurence Rossignol, the Secretary of State for the Family, Elderly People and Adult Care, asking for the government to introduce such a law in France.
Candelier told France TV Info that his proposal would employ access codes at each connection attempt on porn sites, and that the measure would be similar to the filters put in place in the U.K.
Besides pornography, other categories of content filtering in the U.K. include dating, violence and weapons, drugs, tobacco and alcohol, gambling, file-sharing, gaming websites, self-harm, anorexia and social networking.
Candelier said that minors are at risk in France because the sites are simply too easy to access. "I don't condemn the existence of these sites, but they have to be reserved for adults,” he said.
In the U.K., “ISPs are obliged to offer their customers solutions to restrict access to certain addresses. One can quite decide to return to this option and automatically filter pornographic sites,” Candelier said. “Of course, there is always a risk of inadvertent seizure, which affects sites that have nothing to do with pornography.
“But the device may be refined as and when necessary. I think in any case that over time, given the evolution of our society, it will reach an automatic blocking pornographic sites.”
XBIZ London 2015, presented by Epoch, will deliver a number of educational sessions discussing the current business climate for distributors of adult content in the U.K., as well as other European countries. The conference, set for Sept. 15-18 at the Hilton DoubleTree Tower of London Hotel, unites the U.K.’s adult industry with the European and broader international online business communities to deliver a range of exclusive business insights and executive deal-making that sets the stage for the fall show season.