Internet service providers have been saying the technology isn’t available and such filtering wouldn’t be economically feasible. But this week British Telecom, the UK’s largest high-speed ISP announced it would soon start blocking all child pornography, The Guardian reports. Child pornography is illegal in most countries. The move “would not have been possible a year ago, but improvements in computer processing speeds means that the company is now able to block Web sites, offensive pages, and even individual images of abuse” with a technology called Cleanfeed that BT’s been testing in consultation with the British Home Office. BT is talking with other ISPs about adopting the technology and will license it to them as wholesale customers, the BBC reports. The BBC adds that this development, however, will have little impact on pedophiles, who will still have plenty of avenues available to them for child-porn trafficking, such as newsgroups, chat, file-sharing, and IM. An analysis at The Register, which explains how Cleanfeed works, adds that the technology isn’t even a complete solution technically – “it only looks at port 80” on subscribers’ PCs, and port 80 only deals with Web surfing, not email, file-sharing, IM-ing, etc.
As for the free-speech angle, The Guardian suggests that BT’s move “will lead to the first mass censorship of the Web attempted in a Western democracy.” Filtering at this level had been “associated only with oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China, which have censored sites associated with dissidents. But many in the field of child protection believe that the explosion of paedophile sites justifies the crackdown,” according to The Guardian. Nobody ever said that online child protection is simple – especially at any level beyond the household, and it isn’t even simple there!
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