In response to the UK government proposal to block pornography at source by Internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK, they have said it is unlikely to prove effective.
This reaction comes after the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey’s statement which asked ISPs to cut off access to pornographic material from their end and set up an age verification scheme to govern access to pornographic sites, according to BBC.
A meeting has been planned between the government and ISPs to discuss this issue in detail. However, experts indicated that technical challenges mean any large scale filtering system is doomed to failure.
The ISPA industry body secretary general Nicholas Lansman was quoted by BBC as saying that ISPA firmly believes that controls on children’s access to the Internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down.
Parents have been provided with many different means of controlling what is accessible via the computers in their homes, according to Lansman.
He added online safety is a priority issue for the Internet industry and ISPA will be discussing the options available to protect children with Government.
"ISPs currently block child abuse content which is illegal and widely regarded as abhorrent," Lansman said.
"Blocking lawful pornography content is less clear cut, will lead to the blocking of access to legitimate content and is only effective in preventing inadvertent access."
UK’s largest ISP BT said there are many legal, consumer rights and technical issues that would need to be considered before any new web blocking policy was developed.
Indicating the technical impossibility to completely block this stuff, ISP Timico chief technology officer Trefor Davies said the sheer volume of pornographic material online and the number of ways that people access it, via the Web, file-sharing networks, news groups, discussion boards and the like, made the job impossible.
Stating filtering systems as very blunt tool that often blocks access to sites that could be useful, Davies said one ends up with a system that’s either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it’s just not effective.
Echoing his comments, the Open Rights Group chair Jim Killock said this is not about pornography, it is about generalised censorship through the back door.
Safer Media co-chair Miranda Suit was quoted by BBC as saying that the pornography available on the internet was "qualitatively and quantitatively" different from any that has gone before.
"Children are becoming addicted in their teens to internet pornography, and they are being mentally damaged so they cannot engage in intimate relationships," she added.
Putting her organisation’s complete support to the government call to block pornography ‘at source’, Suit said, "What we are talking about is censorship to protect our children."
