One hundred and forty years later, and another moraliser has taken on the anti-vice mantle, this time in the shape of a young man named David Cameron. As Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Cameron campaigned against the distribution of obscene materials. This time, the focus was on a medium that Comstock could never have dreamed of: the internet. With support from a right wing press besotted by ‘family values’ — a carbon copy of Victorian Morality — Cameron pressed for greater restrictions on material distributed through the internet. Like his forbear, Cameron chose not to focus on those producing or possessing objectionable content, but those transmitting it. The Internet Service Providers are the Postal Service of their day, and under threat of expensive and onerous legislation, they were coerced into creating filters that would intercept and remove obscene content as it passed through their channels, like electronic Comstocks on the mail train.

Neither Cameron’s government nor the US legislature of Comstock’s day sought to define the indecent materials they were banning. Instead, they left it up to those enforcing the restrictions to decide what fell inside. It was Comstock’s Society that interpreted the law, and often their views were challenged by defendants in the courts. It wasn’t just pornography that Comstock hoped to suppress. As well as indecent materials, the 1873 Postal Act forbid using the mail service to deliver contraceptive devices and information on contraception and sexual health. A staunch opponent of the Women’s Suffrage movement, Comstock also used his powers to suppress activists, in particular Tennessee Celeste Claflin and her sister Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first women in the USA to found a newspaper.

In the UK, it’s unclear who exactly decides what falls outside the boundaries of decency in Cameron’s filtered internet. Under the default filtering scheme, each ISP is tasked with coming up with its own technology for implementing the blocks. As well as these filters, some ISPs already provide existing “family safe” options that censor large swathes of the web. Some of these outsource the operation of their filters to third party companies. All of these build upon an existing blacklist drawn up by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a registered charity supported by donations from industry bodies. (The IWF was set up in large part by Clive Feather, the director of ISP Demon Internet, after Demon itself was threatened with a raid from the Metropolitan Police in 1996 for the publication of obscene material, in this case Usenet discussion groups on which paedophiles were trading child pornography. Once again, it was the communication channel, rather than the producers or consumers, that was targeted. Ironically, Demon Internet at the time lambasted the threat of a police raid as censorship by an unelected body).

Classes of material removed by these modern filters include not just pornography, but that pertaining to drugs, alcohol and tobacco, gambling, fashion, social networking and games. And just like in Comstock’s day, these filters remove information about sexual health services, even more effectively than they remove pornography. A BBC investigation this week discovered that filters employed by the major ISPs also blocked access to child protection services and addiction counselling.

Cameron has since announced that ISPs would have to build upon these ‘porn’ blocks, censoring political material under the banner of “extremism” — no doubt a charge that could have been applied to the Women’s Suffrage movement in its day. No one knows exactly how much material disappeared from the internet when these filters were implemented. The vanished content likely far surpasses the fifteen tons of books and four million images that Comstock erased. As with Comstock, arguments over the application of the filters are likely to be settled in court as playwrights, artists, authors, photographers, activists and others suffer the overreach of the judicious Packet Inspectors.