“Confusion reigns” over the new proposal to filter internet access, because it has not been properly announced yet. Or, more likely, because it’s not been properly thought out. What we do know is that we know very little, but that’s OK because that well known technical expert, David Cameron, will be telling us all about it “later today”.
Is it opt-in or opt-out? Opt-out, i.e. switched on by default, is clearly a bad thing. The big four ISPs involved in this seem not to know themselves, but commercial pressures will tend towards it being opt-in only. Filtering costs money, and there are very small margins in the retail ISP industry.
Who decides what will be blocked? Someone has to make some policy decisions on what is acceptable – is what going to be the government or ISPs? Do we block just hard-core porn? What about page 3 images? Sites linked to terrorism? Sexual health sites? Sites accused of providing access to copyrighted material? Sites for dealing with LGBT issues, domestic violence, forced marriage… the list goes on. This is a big issue, because of the danger of further marginalising certain groups. What is acceptable content to one group is not acceptable to another.
Who pays? If it’s free, then you are effectively paying a tax on your unfiltered broadband service in order to subsidise those who do want filtering. Or will there be government money for this?
Will the block list be public? If a site ends up on the list without intending to, because of one image, will they be notified? This happened to Wikipedia with the IWF kiddy porn list, because of differences of opinion in what constituted child pornography, but the IWF list is not public.
How do you appeal? Who can appeal? Another messy area. Your site ends up on the block list, what now? Is there a presumption of removal until it’s shown it’s definitely infringing? For commercial sites, being blocked for even a few days could send them out of business. What if it’s a foreign site, does the site owner need to appeal or can anyone do it?
How is it going to work technically? We already have the IWF child porn block on many ISPs, but that is only intended to stop accidental, casual access. It’s trivial to bypass. If a site switches to secure connections (HTTPS) what then? Or connections on ports other than the default web port? Will whole sites be blocked or just the specific image or page that’s a problem? What about proxy sites? I’d expect well-advertised proxy sites and software to spring up the moment any filtering system goes live. “No dear, I’m not looking at porn online. How can I, we have a filtered connection!”
I don’t expect these to get answered today of course, because from the reactions of the big four ISPs it appears that this hasn’t been thought through.
Good questions – the answers would be even more interesting 🙂 Perhaps worth considering that the logical extension of the policy the party passed on page 3 would put those images into the restricted category.
Web filtering is one of those things that sounds better in theory than in practice – but its effect in practice is incredibly difficult to do. Eg I have a friend on facebook who likes to provoke their picture filtering system by posting fairly famous nude paintings by highly regarded artists.
And my experience of teenage boys (ie having been one!) is they will find ways round most restrictions on accessing nudie pictures
This is a really good post and you ask all the right questions.
And then there’s the issue of the embarrassment factor if you like of ticking the “I want it to be unfiltered” box – I suspect that will put people off.
I hate the idea of handing over to an ISP the right to determine what I can see. I would much rather decide that for myself. I obviously agree with the child porn filter because of the nature of the crime being committed to make it.
And, to be honest, the whole idea of the filter means that parents are lulled into a false sense of security. If kids aren’t seeing that kind of stuff at home, they may be at their mate’s house.
My biggest worry is that my daughter may face expectations from future partners based on what they have seen on freely accessible porn – but I kind of think that my job is to give her confidence to tell boys who want to treat her in that way to get raffled. She grows up with an expectation that she will play an equal role, not a subjugative one in any relationship. We actually need to have an open debate about how rubbish porn is from everything to body image to the way it portrays women.