American Airlines is under fire from customers and flight attendants because their inflight Internet service will give passengers access to pornographic websites (despite no recorded incidents of it happening). They want filtering software installed to keep all naughty stuff out of the air (Die Hard 4 as inflight entertainment not a problem though). If people are that desperate to watch porn in the middle of the Pacific, they can do so as we speak with a laptop and 60 gigs of downloaded movies.

Closer to home, Qantas says they wont offer open Internet access to passengers on their A380 planes until 2009 because of logistical and regulatory issues. Instead they will offer a ‘canned version’ of the Internet (*cough* sponsor’s websites only anyone?).

As Jon says on STOP, this is a very real example how hysteria over pornography has a direct and undeniably undesirable consequence on the liberties of responsible adults.

Tip off via Stace.