I recently had a discussion with a few people on whether one should filter the net or not for his kids. Here are a few thoughts I consider worth sharing.

I've got 3 kids (9, 13, 15), each one has his own laptop since they are able to read (and even before for the last one).

I took, since the very beginning the stance of educating my kids on what can be found and what can happen on the net.  I have also told them to tell my wife or me when they feel offended. I have also showed them how to block unsolicited contact on chats. In fact, I decided to apply to them the same principles that I got throughout my education^[1] . So far, only once was I asked by my youngest one how can she avoid seeing some sites when she does a search, and showed her how to use a filtered version of Google (that was 3 month ago).

I really fail to see what I could do to filter the net appropriately without blocking appropriate content for my wife, my oldest kid while safeguarding my youngest one (yes, I do think that a 15y old should be able to access porn if he feels like it, as long as he knows what he is doing, how actors are selected for porn, and that sex is no truer than violence is in movies). Moreover, I think that the biggest fear a parent should have is to have their kids being lured into something by people hanging around on kid's specific sites (which obviously will NOT be blocked by any filters).

These kids sites, even though they take action to prevent this, are were the weird old guys are hanging, acting as kids to gain their confidence and then try to have them do something you wouldn't want your kid to do. There is strictly nothing you can do to prevent this from happening, apart from warning your children about it, telling them to always be cautious of any new encounter on the net as they would be in the street.

As you certainly teach (or will teach) them to not accept cookies from stranger in the street, that their body is their property and no one should ever be able to do something that they do not feel right about, that their are sick people outside and to explain, you should explain that the same can happen on the net. More than 10 times my kids came and asked me of what I thought of this contact or this other one. Half of the time I advised them to block them as they seemed suspicious enough, even though they were on a kids gaming site or some other innocuous site. Wackos are on the net on kids site, as they can be in schools, sport clubs or in the street...

So, filter the net if you feel like it, but I personally feel that it is as stupid and useless to do this has parents as it is for governments. Please, do not consider that filtering will protect your kids from the darkest side of humanity: IT WILL NOT. Only your transmission of basic safeguarding rules and good sense will, as it will in real life.

Nota bene: it is really unfortunate that the french government really receives poor advice from some of its experts, as they seem to believe that there are ways for the owner of an internet line to secure foolproofly whom uses it and what can be done with it in its latest law proposal to safeguard the "creation" on the internet. Soon any French may be shut off the internet without any kind of hearing, if the it can be established that illegal media was loaded through its internet line. What a stupid thought...

[1] as a side note, I remember a time when my dad decided to block me from accessing my computer when I was 10 or 11.  He took the power brick off my TRS-80.  Guess what I did the next day?  I went and bought one for the Tandy shop, and waited for my parents to go to bed to go on hacking all night.  If you really think that your kids will really be blocked by your filters, chances are you are giving them their first lesson at net hacking. It really does not take long for someone to find out how to build an HTTP tunnel, as there are literrally dozens of tools to do so.  Most of them have been writen by employees tired of being filtered by their employers, why wouldn't your kid start using them?