Dear Congressmen,

I rarely contact my congressmen about stuff. (By rarely I mean next to never.) Some organization called me this evening about their initiative they are trying to drum up support for. It involves Internet content filtering. Their technical documentation can be found at CP80 Technology As a result, I just emailed both senators and the represenative for this area.

The girl started to say "There are over 65000 internet ports that can be used for pornography." While this is technically true, it's not really. Internet traffic is nearly all on ports 80 and 443, I venture to say nearly all the porn is on port 80. This was all going on in my head while she was talking about legislation, petitions, and soliciting donations. When she asked for my support, I asked her what ports they planned to block. She said she didn't know, but what did I mean by a port? I asked her what she meant, and just got the site for their technical docs. (She was just basically a telemarketer, after all...)

After the call, I went to their site. Basically they want to make a law that adult content must be on an different port than tcp:80. (The regular public web server port.) They want to block an 'country' that refuses to cooperate. (As if this problem only comes from outside the US...) Their plan would allow people to ask their ISP to block the new porn port.

While I am in no way whatsoever opposed to internet filtering (I plan to move off Comcast as soon as the new ISP in my area arrives (2-3 weeks) that does do filtering.), I do not think this is the solution. For one thing, there is no way to really enforce this. ISPs could try, but there would be a lot of money spent somewhere trying to get sites to change, and they would never be able to stop these things. (When was the last time you got email from someone in Africa trying to move money out of the country, or an email from the paypal customer support looking for your information? Slightly different problem, same sort of enforcement problems.)

I let the congressmen know I would be in favor of legislation giving ISPs some sort of incentive for doing filtering (like via a proxy server like we use at work), and even subsidizing the things if the ISPs can get them inplemented. I think if the government made it worth the ISP's while to provide filtering for no extra fee, or maybe even a reduced price in internet charges, a large number of people would take advantange of it. Trying to get porn sites to change the port they use will never work.