Rob Manuel

Originally written for The Times in March 2011 but they didn’t use it.

This Thursday morning I started receiving tweets saying that people couldn’t access the site I run – B3ta.com – via their O2 mobile phones. It’s now blocked under an age verification scheme requiring phone users to pay £1 to prove they’re over 18.

B3ta, to be clear, is not a porn site, but a forum for people making comedy pictures somewhat in the spirit of Viz. If you’ve ever had images of cats in headphones or Amy Winehouse standing next to a tube sign saying “High Barnet” emailed to you, then they probably originated on B3ta.

And we’re not the only site blocked; the filter is creating a myriad of false positives and categorising innocent sites as smut.Twitter user @weareglitter writes: “I couldn’t look at a link Victoria Coren posted to her book, which has ‘poker’ in the title.”

Google Translate is having problems, as is urbandictionary.com – a compendium of slang – and bravissimo.com,a bra shop for large boobed women.

O2 is putting a paywall on sites it doesn’t own and pocketing the cash – they are giving their customers £2.50 credit on their bills, but this is funny money internal accounting nonsense. Your average phone company gets 6500 per cent mark up on texting for example. They are swapping your very real £1 for magic beans.

Their hollow message is: “we’re doing this to protect children who use mobile devices.” Anyone with children old enough to use phones will know their kids are cunning enough to “borrow” their parents credit card and get round age restrictions. It’s a security measure that’s as about as childproof as a wrapper on a bar of chocolate.

So if it’s so easy to get round, why do I care? Age verification schemes create a two tiered internet. You won’t be able to look at sites like B3ta in your office, in schools and so on – no business or educational establishment will turn off these filters. Advertising revenue will naturally go away; this is because it is a numbers game and traffic will drop once these sites once restrictions start to be felt.

However, any sites run by large companies will sail though as they’ll be able to lobby any blocks put on them. These days the Daily Mail website is an endless breast-fest – not a day goes by without a sighting of Kelly Brook’s near naked baps. But it would be unlikely that the mouthpiece of Middle England will be classified as over 18 content, because an organisation like the Mail has too much financial muscle.

We can all point to occasions when individuals have tried to censor the internet, but the internet sticks up two fingers to the censor and finds a way round the problem. This is known as the “Streisand effect” after photos of the singer’s house appeared by chance in a scientific survey of coastal erosion. Babs went mental and demanded their removal; the public responded by copying the images and posting them to hundreds of different sites.

However, creating a barrier to usability is far more destructive than individuals openly censoring content. Whereas the latter acts as a spur to defy, making something a bit clunky will make the user just think “nah” and reach for the back button.

Welcome to your new internet, where the sites run by big business are readily available. Anything that’s not liked by the authorities is placed in a walled garden, starved of sunlight to wither and die.