Porn is everywhere. 80 percent of the web is porn. There’s porn here on Lemmy and on Mastodon. It seems like a whack-a-mole situation .
The same way they banned drugs. Not very well.
Conservatives have been labeling anything and everything they don’t like as “porn”. A queer romance novel is “porn”. Two male characters kissing on television is “porn”. Drag queen story time is “porn”. The picture book Heather Has Two Mommies is “porn”. And the thing they’re really most afraid of, educational resources for LGBTQ youth are “porn”.
So by declaring porn illegal, they now have a pretext to go after everything they call “porn”. Their goal isn’t to remove all porn from the internet, it’s to make it harder for people who need those educational resources to access them. It’s not about porn, it’s about “porn”.
- Regulate all traffic sent or received across the state.
- Send traffic through a firewall.
- decrypt traffic
- drop traffic that can’t be decrypted.
Another easier way:
- Regulate ISPs with new state laws.
- require they block porn.
- Sue ISPs that violate the law.
decrypt traffic
drop traffic that can’t be decrypted.
This would be an absolute fucking disaster for myriad reasons both technical and practical. Any politician who earnestly suggests it as any sort of solution 100% has no idea what they’re talking about and should not be taken seriously.
Yes, politicians talk about trying to do something like that, but the reality is that it would destroy security for businesses, institutions, and even the government itself. Encryption and VPNs are crucial to just about any modern business of even moderate size.
Many US companies have businesses inside China, it’s bad but it’s not impossible. I wouldn’t be surprised if a state actually doesn’t.
Those also companies use VPNs when they transmit, bring burner devices, and take other countermeasures to try protect their data from theft.
Additionally, there are plenty of people who are citizens there and still get around their firewall.
Actually getting rid of encryption or making it ineffective would be a disaster: IP theft, identity theft, and all sorts of other problems would greatly intensify without it.
