Before Brexit exploded all over the UK, David Cameron and his government were busy trying to pass the contentious Digital Economy Bill.

One of the primary components of this bill—Section 3—concerns age verification for pornography websites. Essentially the government wants to protect people under the age of 18 from the perceived moral corruption of viewing adult websites. The bill specifically states that: "A person must not make pornographic material available on the Internet on a commercial basis to persons in the United Kingdom except in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18."

Failure to register with the as-yet-undefined scheme, or wilfully facilitating access to porn sites for under-18s, will render an offender or company liable to fines of £200,000, or 10 percent of turnover, whichever is greater.

In the consultation paper that was issued before the bill itself, the government also (quite smartly in my opinion) admitted that a certain number of people will try and bypass the adult verification system and other blocks in order to access porn, saying: “We recognise that protections put in place are likely to be challenged by the more technically able and determined users of online pornographic content.”

The government may however have massively underestimated how many people would want to evade the block, and the percentage of those who might use advanced tools such as VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), BitTorrent clients, or even Tor. In fact, the Digital Economy Bill may well have totally missed the mark in its attempt to “save the children.”

Ernesto at TorrentFreak, a well-known pirate news site, says that the block is "not about outright banning underage people from seeing all pornography; it’s about making it that little bit more difficult to access.”

The more paranoid amongst us may well see this as the UK government’s opening shot in an attempt to regulate Internet access and fear that it may prove to be the thin end of the wedge. Ernesto also commented that torrent sites may well see a spike in traffic when other avenues for easy access to porn are blocked, effectively pushing content consumers further away from the legal downloads and any adult verification system.

Ease of access

Access to pornography by underage people isn’t a new problem. The only difference is that the distribution medium and ease of availability has changed. Before the Internet made it all easy, schools and colleges used to be awash with top-shelf magazines and grainy pirated VHS cassettes that frequently changed hands.

Years ago, few minors had access to the technology to duplicate the films. With the advent of DVD porn and fast Internet connections the problem changed format.

The key to understanding why the government has set itself on a road to failure is that it is no longer the year 2000, with slow Internet and low-res porn. Consumers are now used to watching HD video instantly and on demand.

A significant proportion of pornography is downloaded from BitTorrent sites, in what is politely referred to as "copyright infringement" or "stealing," depending on whom you ask. Add in streaming, and the general consensus is that the amount of graphic content viewed but not paid for may easily surpass 50 percent of the viewing total.

To get their porn fixes most people (even those of legal age) turn to torrent sites. Torrent sites are a fatal blow to the government bill because no self-respecting site is going to suddenly start verifying people’s age. These sites usually require an e-mail address at most, and more usually nothing, as with public trackers such as The Pirate Bay.

Complicating things for the government is the fact that most of these torrent sites are based abroad, in legally obscure areas of the world. The sheer number of sites also adds another headache. Ernesto believes that if the government does take any action against torrent sites, it would probably be against those that either deal exclusively or extensively in porn. That would give the government a much more focused range of potential targets, but it remains to be seen what would actually happen.

As noted earlier, torrent sites themselves are not exactly known as bastions of government subservience. Annoyingly for the civil service wonks, torrent sites also have a tendency to be quite resilient to takedowns, and love to play games of whack-a-mole with the authorities. Take one down and another appears, as we saw recently with Kickass Torrents. Within 24 hours it was up and running again, albeit under another site's terms and banner.

To put the level of resilience into context, the Pirate Bay—certainly the most famous of the torrent sites—has survived 13 years of sustained assault from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), content producers, Apple, Microsoft, and first-world governments. The number of sustained outages on the Pirate Bay can be counted on one hand, even in the wake of a full-on government raid.

The UK government's response to this resilience was to block access by other means, i.e. using an ISP-level block. At first these court-ordered blocks of file-sharing sites hampered users, but users quickly found ways around them.

People want content and they will do what is needed to access it. Bypassing the piracy blocks set up by BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media takes less than 20 seconds by way of easy-to-set-up VPNs, or simply by way of a proxy site on another domain name that hasn't been blocked. There's no reason to believe that the UK government's war on porn won't also be trivial to circumvent.

Techier alternatives

Even if the government does manage to make inroads into reducing the amount of porn available via torrenting, there are innumerable other ways to get access to content, for example ad-sponsored illegal streams and binary newsgroups.

Getting a £5-per-month VPN is an especially quick and effective way around the blocking of torrent sites. Smart users can use a VPN to effectively hop to another country that isn’t covered by a badly implemented porn block.

For those that can’t or won’t pay for a VPN, they can use Tor to get their fix. Thanks to its design, Tor can easily bypass most ISP-level blocks.

When Tor is combined with a magnet link (which uses a torrent hash rather than a complete file that requires downloading), a teen who wants porn would only have to fire up Tor, surf to The Pirate Bay, copy the magnet link, and paste that link into their BitTorrent client of choice. It is that simple.

The government can’t win; it would be very difficult to block Tor, and would result in a nasty, ugly fight with Internet activists who know the terrain far better.

So unless the government manages to block (or ideally take down entirely) the vast majority of torrent sites—which it can't—the solution it implements will only cover those who cant figure out how to use a VPN or BitTorrent.