Fast food restaurants are quintessentially American. No matter where you go, you can count on a McDonald’s to essentially be just like the ones back home. It can offer comfort in troubling times. Maybe, in fact, a little too much comfort, as McDonald’s has been taking drastic measures with its free WiFi.
Solving a problem that is at once completely mystifying and utterly disgusting, McDonalds has just enacted a ban on porn across its free WiFi. For those unfamiliar, you can walk into most Mickey D’s and log on at no charge, offered as a convenience to busy people and Pokémon Go players. It was, apparently, completely unfiltered WiFi as well, although that’s changed.
The move was in response to a group called Enough Is Enough, which wants, in their words, to “make the internet safer for children and families.” Apparently, they’ve been conducting a pressure campaign on McDonald’s and Starbucks to filter porn sites out of their WiFi. Unfortunately, EIE is just as sketchy as the sites they’re campaigning against: They spent most of the ’90s trying to get porn thrown off the internet to “protect the children,” and losing repeatedly at the Supreme Court over it.
Of course, this doesn’t mean they’re wrong to say people shouldn’t be going to McDonald’s to look at Brazzers, but it doesn’t seem to be an actual problem, something that EIE admits in their own press release. That said, searching on the internet has yielded a handful of incidents, so even though they want to get rid of the parts of the internet they personally don’t like, maybe EIE was onto something. That said, “blocking porn at McDonalds,” while arguably worthwhile, seems a lot lower on the “protecting kids” list than, say, preventing human trafficking, so maybe they could focus more on that, rather than what people watch online?
(via Eater)