We might joke about the "Great Firewall of China", but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK.
In June, Vernon Coaker, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department told Parliament, "I have recently set the UK Internet industry an objective to make sure that by the end of 2007 all Internet service providers offering broadband Internet links to the UK public stop their customers from accesssing those Web sites." By "those", he means Web sites carrying pornographic images of children.
Coaker said that by the end of 2006 he anticipates 90 percent of ISPs to have blocked "access to sites abroad", and that, "We believe that working with the industry offers us the best way forward, but we will keep that under review if it looks likely that the targets will not be met."
The two logical next questions: How? And How much?
Like a lot of places, the UK has two main types of broadband access: cable and DSL. DSL is mainly provided by BT, either retail directly to customers or wholesale to smaller ISPs. Since 2004, BT's retail service is filtered by its Cleanfeed system, which last February the company informed was blocking about 35,000 attempts to visit child pornography sites per day. The list of sites to block comes from the Internet Watch Foundation, and is brought together from reports submitted by the public. ISPs pay IWF £5,000 a year to be supplied with the list – irrelevant to a company like BT but not necessarily to a smaller one. But the raw cost of the IWF list is insignificant compared to the cost of reengineering a network to do content blocking.
I’ll guess we’ll wait and see how this initiative will be implemented on the long run.
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