It doesn’t include the written word… yet. Though the kind of people who think these things up will have that in their sights, I’m sure.
The age verification they propose is not satisfied by a “Proceed” question either. It has to be done via credit card or something similar. But then again, he makes the point they have no clue how the internet works. There’s no way to police it for content hosted outside the UK, which has no obligation to conform to any act passed by our parliament, and therefore makes the entire thing ridiculous. As he says, it’s the smaller UK content providers who are going to be hurt by this. Those who produce pornography that fits in a niche, that probably isn’t created exclusively by men, for men, and isn’t necessarily hetero or vanilla. Sad.
I doubt this has anything to do with what children see or not on the internet: there are plenty of parental control things out there, and if that fails, supervision of online time would work. I’ve always thought that letting kids loose on the internet is a bit like leaving them on a street corner. But anyway, I think that’s just a convenient facade to justify a war on pornography (especially certain kinds of pornography). Yet again, I find myself wondering what the hell people have against it. They don’t have to watch, it’s easy to avoid. I’m always tempted to think that some of us are just more adult than others. *sighs*