Prolog OPINION
Feckless ISPs are getting what they deserve with Cameron’s filters, says BARRY COLLINS
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o, the Great Wall of Westminster is going up: Britain’s ISPs have been effectively blackmailed into switching on default content filters. Cameron, 1, Common Sense, 0. Despite the prime minister’s reckless promise that it will now take only “one click to protect your whole home and to keep your children safe,” anyone who’s ever used one of these filters – which presumably doesn’t include the prime minister – will know that statement is dangerously ignorant. None of these filters work perfectly, and some are downright ineffective (as our Labs test next month will reveal). The TalkTalk filter we tested last year, which is now being endorsed by the Conservative Party, blocked access to Mr Cameron’s YouTube channel, but it didn’t prevent us from searching for porn on Google, for example. (To be fair, I wouldn’t want my kids watching “Webcameron”, either.) Privately, the ISPs are furious. We’ve had off-the-record briefings from two of the major ISPs pointing out holes in the plan, and there’s been a series of leaks from industry meetings with ministers, not to mention the release of an inflammatory letter from the Department of Education to ISPs in which they were being leaned on to bend to the PM’s wishes. None of these were leaked from the government side, I can assure you. The ISPs wanted us, the technical press, to do their dirty work for them, since they didn’t want to publicly oppose the default filters. ISPs are as aware as we are that the filters don’t work. They know that six months down the line, someone from the Daily Mail will spend ten minutes discovering they can still access a smorgasboard of smut via BT, Virgin Media, Sky or TalkTalk, and that they’ll be back on the front page again, accused of corrupting Britain’s innocent youth. But they deserve the media storm that’s coming to them, since they’ve stood by silently as Cameron and Perry have trampled all over them. Why didn’t the ISPs stand up to the government? Perhaps you should ask Ian Livingston – sorry, Lord Livingston of Parkhead – the outgoing head of BT who’s jumped ship to become a minister for trade and investment in David Cameron’s government. Or maybe you should have a word with Dido Harding, the chief executive of TalkTalk, whose husband is John Penrose, another minister in Cameron’s government. Then there’s Sky, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Virgin Media, run by
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former News International chief executive Tom Mockridge. I’ll just leave that there... Yet, even if the government didn’t exert any influence over its associates at the head of Britain’s biggest ISPs – and I don’t have a shred of evidence to suggest it did – the broadband providers had another reason to keep their heads down. It would have taken a good deal of courage for one of the ISPs’ chief executives to face the wrath of the newspapers that have been tirelessly campaigning for porn to be blocked. Said chief executive would, as The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker once memorably said, become a “human dartboard [while] Eric f****** Bristow’s on the oche throwing a million darts made of human s*** right at you”. (That quote’s been passed through the Cameron filter.) And so, because the ISPs had neither the courage nor the will to oppose Cameron’s porn fatwa, they’re about to become Britain’s unofficial internet censors, filtering all types of content – not only pornography – unless you specifically ask them not to. This move doesn’t have popular support. The government’s response to the consultation
Because the ISPs didn’t oppose Cameron’s porn fatwa, they’re about to become Britain’s unofficial internet sensors on parental controls on the internet, published last December, said only 35% of the parents who responded favoured default filtering of the internet by their ISP. Nor does it encourage parents to take a more active interest in online safety. Now they can simply click “Accept” and have their ISP babysit their children for them. It must be safe – the prime minister said it was. I confidently predict that within a few months of these filters being switched on, the ISPs’ customer care lines will be clogged with irate customers, either because 14-year-old Nathan and his mates have just found a way around the filters to watch Debbie Does Droylsdon, or because eight-year-old Anthea can’t do her homework because the internet filter has stopped her looking up something entirely innocent on Wikipedia. I hope the poor souls manning the lines put the calls through to the chief executive’s office. Or the prime minister’s.
BARRY COLLINS is the editor of PC Pro. He hopes he can still look up Malcolm Tucker quotes once the filters kick in. Blog: www.pcpro.co.uk/links/barryc Email: editor@pcpro.co.uk
PC PRO•OCTOBER 2013
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