UK plan to ban web porn draws concern from providers; Experts say it's ... - New York Daily News

BY Philip Caulfield
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, December 21st 2010, 10:50 AM

Ban porn?

Should governments be able to ban web porn to protect children?

A proposal to block Internet porn in Britain is causing an uproar among Internet service providers, web experts and digital privacy advocates who say the plan won't work.

British Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said in an interview with the Sunday Times that the government wanted to cut off access to pornographic websites to protect children.

Under the new proposal, ISPs would block household computers from all porn sites, and parents who wanted to watch porn would have to opt in – that is, specifically request the ability to view porn websites.

"This is a very serious matter," Vaizey said. "I think it's very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children. I'm hoping they will get their acts together so that we don't have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."

The plan is still in its early stages, and the British government is working to set up a meeting with ISPs to discuss the issue.

But while ISPs said they support the idea, many think any plan to cut off access to the millions of porn websites was a long-shot.

"Unfortunately, it's technically not possible to completely block this stuff," Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at Britain's ISP Timico, told BBC.

Filtering systems are often imperfect, he said, and a giant porn filter would block access to websites that were not hosting pornographic material.

"The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind," Timico told BBC.

Nicholas Lansman secretary general of ISPA, the U.K.'s trade association for ISPs, said online safety was a priority issue, but that the responsibility of monitoring what children view online should fall to parents.

"ISPA firmly believes that controls on children's access to the Internet should be managed by parents...with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down," Lansman told the BBC.

He also said that ISPs currently block illegal and "abhorrent" child abuse content, but that blocking lawful pornography content would lead to the blocking of legitimate websites.

ISPs Virgin Mobile and BT, which already have programs that block some content, and Talk Talk have said they support the idea.

There have been successful attempts to stop Internet porn in the past.