Good Luck Blocking All of It
There’s a song in Avenue Q—the Sesame Street parody musical—called The Internet Is for Porn, and for a long time it felt more like documentary than satire. Iceland, weirdly, seemed like it might be the exception: for a few years it was being positioned as some kind of digital utopia, a place where radical transparency and left-wing governance would build something genuinely different. Then in 2013, Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson started assembling cross-party support to make Iceland the first European democracy to ban internet pornography entirely.
Everything, automatically blocked. The horny-teen classroom scenarios, the celebrity tapes, the entire taxonomy of Japanese kink that has spawned a thousand reaction videos. Criminal liability for credit card holders who paid for any of it. His advisor Halla Gunnarsdóttir made the case with a straight face: We are not against sex.
Which is precisely what someone who is somewhat against sex would say. This came two years after Iceland had already shuttered its strip clubs, so there was a pattern forming.
What strikes me isn’t the prudishness—that’s just politics, every generation rediscovers it—but the technological delusion baked into the proposal. The idea that you can wall off a category of content from the entire internet, permanently, without anyone routing around it, is the kind of thinking that sounds credible in a parliamentary session and falls apart the moment a teenager with five minutes and a VPN enters the picture. The market for external hard drives would have exploded. The YouPorn archive would have existed on encrypted thumb drives across the country within weeks.
The fear that pornography destroys moral clarity—that young people can’t distinguish real intimacy from staged performance—is a real anxiety dressed up in an unworkable solution. Censorship doesn’t build the critical vocabulary people need to navigate explicit material. It just produces kids who know how to use Tor and now also have something to hide.
As far as I know, the full ban never passed. The internet remains, stubbornly, for porn.