About a decade ago a bunch of porn company executives who want to make additional advertising streams of revenue, found common cause with evangelical anti-porn Christians and prescriptive post-second-wave radical feminists, inflated as a group by a cohort of ageing boomers who are scared of technological change and some reflexively anti-capitalist (and possibly anti-semitic) middle class do-gooders with a battlecry of “won’t somebody please think of the children!?!”.
They decided that a proportionate response to weak parenting skills of the masses (not themselves of course, never themselves, especially not the ones who had children who committed suicide) was to force the government to obligate platforms to spy on all the world’s conversations – which of course would solve all the problems – a position with which GCHQ and the NSA happily agreed.
So they drafted a document describing how they think the internet works and therefore how they think the internet should be fixed, put it through several government committees over the course of several years in order to make sure that it was correct, and then passed it as legislation – on the obvious grounds that the kids would appreciate this and not attempt to circumvent any of the controls.
It turns out that there were a few poorly grounded assumptions in play throughout this process.
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