Category Archives: Politics

Ofcom

From ATVOD to Ofcom: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

Comment, Politics,

The recent transfer of Internet censorship powers from ATVOD to Ofcom has been trumpeted as a victory for free expression. It is anything but.

In 2009, the then opposition leader, David Cameron (who, we might remember, used to show vaguely liberal leanings), made a radical pledge: to break up the mighty super-regulator, Ofcom.  As reported by the Guardian, he said:

“With a Conservative government, Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist. Its remit will be restricted to its narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy. And the policy-making functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.”

This was a very important pledge. Ofcom, a large organisation with an annual budget running into the hundreds of millions of pounds, also writes and enforces policy, particularly in the field of television censorship: something that, as Cameron had noticed, is surely the role of government rather than an unelected regulator.

Of course, once the coalition was elected in 2010, this pledge was never heard of again. Ofcom remained intact, and is alive and well to this day. Furthermore, as of 1st January this year, video-on-demand censorship powers were transferred from ATVOD to Ofcom.

When the demise of ATVOD was reported last year, there was much jubilation, especially among small UK porn producers. As probably the original anti-ATVOD campaigner (having been in some way involved with the new VoD regulations since 2007), I too did a little dance on ATVOD’s grave. ATVOD’s CEO, Pete Johnson, had proven to be an obsessive anti-porn activist, and he turned his organisation’s ‘regulatory activity’ into little more than a witch-hunt of British porn publishers.

But some of those involved trumpeted this move as some kind of victory for free expression. Anyone with experience of Ofcom would never make such a mistake. It is a grave threat to online free speech.

Ofcom is a typical New Labour creation: iron-fisted authoritarianism wrapped in a velvet glove of diversity and other fluffy things. Formed by merging multiple regulators into one monolith, it was granted powers of control over our daily lives. Its rules for television are moralistic and wide-ranging, and almost never challenged by our elected representatives. The 2009 version of David Cameron deserves at least a little kudos for even mentioning the problem.

Ofcom’s attitudes to pornography on TV make ATVOD’s prudish rules for VoD seem positively libertine. While online rules allow hardcore porn – at least up to the BBFC’s R18 standard – Ofcom totally banned all explicit sex acts from TV. This applies even to PIN-protected adult channels broadcasting at 3am. In the name of child protection, British adults are banned from watching porn on TV: almost all other EU countries and the ‘prudish’ US allow hardcore porn to be broadcast – many in the middle of the day.

But even the BBFC’s 18 standard for soft porn is too much for the moralists at Ofcom, who have created their own, even softer standard of decency, which is prudish to the point of comedy.

Empowered by the Broadcast Act (2003), Ofcom doesn’t just write law: it is judge, jury and executioner. Tiny breaches of its code can result in fines of tens of thousands of pounds – in fact, it can impose fines of up to £250,000. And it also has the power to order TV channels to close, and even to ban companies from operating TV channels.

Playboy TV, for example, fell foul of Ofcom rules numerous times. Having been fined £25,000 in 2004, it was fined £22,500 in 2008 for broadcasting content that ‘included sequences depicting masturbation, oral sex (both between women and between men and women), clear labial detail, sexual intercourse, and full nudity. Some also included strong language, such as “fuck” and its derivatives and “cunt”, in an overtly sexual context.’

Yes folks, a massive, unelected, publicly-funded organisation issues huge fines to porn businesses that allow adults to see ‘clear labial detail’, on an encrypted TV channel in the middle of the night.

With the convergence of TV and the Internet, Ofcom was always going to make a grab for Internet censorship powers. The closure of ATVOD may have made us all smile, but it fits in with Ofcom’s strategic interests. In fact, ATVOD only existed for temporary convenience, the result of a pretence at co-regulation between government and industry (ATVOD was once a genuine trade association, but was hijacked and turned into a censorship body in 2010).

The current consultation on further Internet censorship powers for Ofcom is ominous indeed. It is clearly an exercise in box-checking before the government inevitably decides that the UK, alone in the democratic world, needs more Internet censorship to protect our under-18s (and purely by accident, protect adults too) from sexual expression. There is little chance that the old, liberal Cameron will leap to our rescue. Internet censorship is on the short-term agenda: the transfer of power from ATVOD to Ofcom was not a victory for free speech, but a signal that state censorship of the Internet is getting serious.

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Dear New York Times – Letter From a Pornstar

Politics, ,

This week, attempts to legally enforce condoms in porn in California were struck down: a great victory for the performers that campaigned against this intrusion into their lives.

In this excellent letter, pornstar Lorelei Lee responds to biased, closed-minded reporting on the issue from the New York Times.

My name is Lorelei Lee and I’m an adult film performer who has worked in the industry for fifteen years. I read your art…

Source: Dear New York Times, — Medium

Queen's Speech Promises State Censorship

ALERT: UK Government Consultation on Further Anti-Porn Law

Moral Panic, Politics, , , , ,

When attacks on civil liberties are announced by governments, they are usually sold under the guise of “tackling terrorism” or “protecting children”. Today, we have an example of the latter.

The UK government today announced the start of a consultation on protecting children from the insidious effects of online pornography. This might seem a little like Groundhog Day to many observers, who have repeatedly seen British porn laws and regulations added and extended over the years, always to “protect children”.

So, it turns out, all of the previous exercises in child protection weren’t enough. Now we need yet more action, since (unsurprisingly) companies based outside of the UK are ignoring our regulations. Since the UK is the only country in the world to implement such a ludicrously large raft of anti-porn laws, this is hardly surprising.

The latest proposals are to implement a new law that can be used to attack those naughty foreign porn sites that ignore the UK’s (pointless) age verification regulations (in other words, all the porn sites in the world). The planned means of attack will to cut off UK revenue streams to porn services, via pressure on services such as payment providers and advertising companies. It is not made clear whether hosting companies or ISPs will also be targeted.

The government document is deeply dishonest in its presentation of evidence that porn is harmful, for at least one good reason: as far as we know, it isn’t. Even the government’s own research suggests that porn access is broadly beneficial to society, rather than harmful. The document ignores this basic fact with skill, and even reprises the discredited ‘research’ from the NSPCC that this campaign challenged last year.

According to research (Kendall), porn use among 15-19 year olds is responsible for a decline in rape among that age-group; yet this is the very group to which the government seeks to switch off access (the government considers everyone under 18 to be a ‘child’ when it comes to pornography).

The document also claims that only 100 sites constitute 77% of UK porn traffic; yet it fails to make the obvious point that if these 100 were somehow blocked, users would move to other sites. So the regulator would have to target another 100, then another 100, and so on. In fact, there are many millions of porn sites (not to mention millions of others that are not pornographic, but which the UK government considers unsuitable for children anyway).

Sex & Censorship will, of course, be submitting a response to this consultation, and begin a campaign of public education to demonstrate how dishonest – not to mention dangerous – this government’s anti-porn campaigns are. We call on supporters to also submit your own responses.

Readers are also asked to consider donating to this campaign – even just a few pounds/euros/dollars can help – to support our work. Think of it as an investment to protect your right to watch free porn.

Parliament’s New Sex Work Inquiry Looks Like a Witch Hunt

Politics

The more vociferously sex workers insist on their right to work, the more ferociously the anti-prostitution lobby tries to abolish the trade. A new parliamentary inquiry has been set up to look into the issue, but with incredibly biased terms of reference: “whether further measures are necessary, including legal reforms, to discourage demand”. In other words, this is about justifying prohibition rather than finding ways to make life safer for sex workers.

Frankie Mullin writes in VICE magazine…

Source: Parliament’s New Sex Work Inquiry Looks Like a Witch Hunt | VICE | United Kingdom

ATVOD Has Closed. Now What?

Politics, ,

The UK’s VoD regulator ATVOD has closed its doors effective 1st January, and its powers have moved within the huge and powerful super-regulator, Ofcom.

Regular readers will be somewhat familiar with the strange and twisted story of ATVOD. In 2010, the regulator came into being in order to regulate VoD alongside broadcast TV, as required by the European Union. But instead of focusing on the convergence of broadcast and VoD, ATVOD instead showed a remarkable obsession with closing down porn sites. Its regulations – especially a requirement for adult sites to verify the ages of all visitors – resulted in the virtual collapse of the UK porn industry. I was one of a number of adult site operators who approached the regulator for guidance in its earliest days, only to find that our necks were first on the block (most UK adult businesses stayed wisely silent and migrated their operations overseas).

From the start, ATVOD’s CEO Pete Johnson showed a remarkable lack of interest in working with the UK’s small adult industry, and chose instead to wipe the bulk of it out. Mine was among the first wave of businesses closed down or forced to move overseas (Playboy TV was another, which moved its headquarters from London to Canada).

As I have pointed out, this was never really about porn: instead, ATVOD has been using the regulations to call for more censorship of the Internet. They have argued that, since British porn has been ‘cleaned up’, then Something Must Be Done to stop British consumers watching porn from overseas. The obvious, but largely unspoken end result will be the introduction of an official state censor with the power to order ISPs to block sites.

While sexual freedom campaigners are delighted to see the anti-porn regulator go, and some are claiming this as a victory, the change is, in reality, ominous, and is unlikely to result in any loosening of porn regulations: in fact Ofcom runs one of the world’s most unnecessarily prudish regimes of TV censorship, and is unlikely to be more relaxed about Internet content. The end of ATVOD has probably been largely driven by disquiet among large broadcasters, who have reportedly been increasingly annoyed to be funding an anti-porn witch-hunt.

Now that Ofcom has taken the reins, we can expect to see the regulator lobbying for more censorship powers against ‘unacceptable’ overseas content – which doubtless will go far broader than pornography. Currently, a private members bill to enable censorship is in progress through Parliament. Like previous non-government attempts, this will probably fail, but we should watch out for the contents of the  Queen’s Speech this Spring. Any mention of ‘online safety’ or ‘protecting children online’ will herald the impending end of free Internet access for British citizens.

My book, Porn Panic!, which documents the increasing attacks on sexual and other expression in the UK, will be published shortly. Please join our mailing list to be alerted about the book, and receive other updates from Sex & Censorship.

ALERT: RIP ATVOD!

Politics

In a surprise move, Ofcom and ATVOD have announced that the regulation of video-on-demand services will be removed from ATVOD (to whom it was delegated) and brought in-house in Ofcom from 1st January.

This is potentially very significant, although the ramifications are unknown at present. Certainly, ATVOD has failed to offer value for money: at a cost to industry of around £500,000 per year, its only action of note has been to force a number of small porn companies out of business, and drive others out of the UK. Although it claims a remit to “protect minors”, it is hard to see how it has achieved this.

Ofcom is a huge and powerful regulator, with TV censorship among its many roles, and is very likely lobbying for a strong Internet censorship role: something this campaign was brought into existence to oppose.

So a cheerful farewell to ATVOD, which most certainly won’t be missed by the porn industry. The question remains though as to whether this move will be for better or worse.

Source: Ofcom to take over VoD regulation from ATVOD » Digital TV Europe

ATVOD: Is It Time to Choose a Side?

Politics

For those trying to follow the increasingly bizarre story of ATVOD – a small, private organisation that is using regulatory powers to attack the UK porn industry – here’s a good read from Ben Yates.

You may have heard of an authority tasked with the regulation of video-on-demand content across the whole of the Internet. It is ATVOD, and it is from its basement offices in Windsor that the team of four permanent employees work to police video content on the web and enforce their regulations where they find breaches and violations.

Source: ATVOD: Is It Time to Choose a Side?