Iceland Hopes to Ban Internet Porn
Iceland hopes to find a successful way to ban Internet pornography in the near future.
Experts and officials in the nation believe porn on the Internet threatens the lives of children influencing them in the wrong ways when they come across it at a young age.
"We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech," said Halla Gunnarsdottir, an adviser to the nations Interior Minister to the Daily Mail.
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Banning porn on the Internet is a daunting task; one that Gunnaradottir feels is difficult, but reachable.
"There is strong consensus building in Iceland," she continued. "We have so many experts, from educationalists to the police who work with children behind this, that this has become much broader than party politics. At the moment, we are looking at the best technical ways to achieve this. But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the Internet."
Iceland has banned print pornography such as magazines for years, but has not updated its laws to include the Internet. Strip clubs were also banned in the nation two years ago under the belief that they violate the rights of women who work there.
However, the elimination of Internet pornography would take more than a simple ban. Current options to do away with it in Iceland include blocking the IP addresses of known porn sites and making it illegal to use credit cards from Iceland to subscribe to X-rated sites.
This type of action in the U.S. would prove useless as the legions of public and private portals on the web could provide access to porn along with millions of software engineers who could find a way around the ban. But Iceland's small 322,000 person population could allow for the banning of Internet porn.
