The four ISPs that have agreed to block explicit web contents – read porn at the time of writing – are Sky, British Telecom, Talk Talk and Virgin according to The Guardian newspaper. Subscribers to those ISPs need to opt-in to be able to view explicit contents on the Internet.

It is expected that the prime minister David Cameron will announce further moves like restricting “aggressive advertising campaigns and certain types of images on billboards”. Those obviously will come without opt-in options.

The government furthermore plans to unleash a website called Parentport to the public which citizens can use to “complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children”.

It is interesting to note that the government believes that they can filter out all explicit contents on the Internet this way. Web filters, even on the ISP level, have weaknesses. This includes not only that they will never have a 100% detection rate, but also that the likelihood of false positives is high.

It is also not clear at the time of writing if individual web pages will get blocked or the entire domain.

That’s beneficial for the Orwellian phantasies of the British government in two ways. They first have established censorship on the ISP level, supported by parts of the population. The term explicit contents, adult contents or even porn is vague at best which leaves lots of room for interpretations. Will this only include images and videos or other forms like texts as well.

Vagueness actually is a common denominator in public state-driven censorship. From a concerned citizen perspective it all boils down to the question of power. Who has the power to decide what to censor and what not to, and what quality objective guidelines are available to base that decision on?

Others might say that violence, drugs, computer games, weapons, Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet should also fall under that censorship.

It is also interesting to note that part of the users who would opt-in won’t because of fear of landing on “the country’s perverts list”.

It is not clear yet how users can opt-in. Do they have to phone their ISP asking for permission to watch porn on the Internet? The opt-in cannot be anonymous, and it would not make sense to display options to opt-in right on the blocked web page.

Update: BBC now contradicts earlier reports stating that parents can opt-in to filter specific types of websites during sign-up (presumably like Open DNS offers packages to block certain types of sites).

The controversial system collected the URLs of websites visited by its customers and the ISP failed to inform either its customers or the ICO before its launch.

Mark Schmid, TalkTalk’s Director of Communication said in a statement “We were simply looking at the urls accessed from our network, we weren’t looking at customer behaviour so we didn’t feel we were obliged to inform customers.  This is all about protecting customers. It is not designed to provide us with data for any other purpose.”

The system scanned the websites visited by TalkTalk customers to aid the company in detailing websites that could contain malware or viruses.

British Telecom had proposed a similar service called Webwise which was heavily criticised by the British public.  BT also conducted trials without informing customers which led to accusations of intercepting private data.

Online privacy is an issue of which the public is becoming increasingly aware, which can only be a positive thing.

The act was one fo the last  actions of the UK’s Labour government before the general election last may that saw them thrown out by British voters in favour of a Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition.  It was controversial legislation that many felt was rushed through parliament without proper scrutiny.

The act allows for the disconnection of persisten illegal file sharers from the Internet, and rights for copyright holders to block websites sharing illegal content.

Critics including TalkTalk said that the new law would potentially criminalise the innocent who, due to the complexity of computers and network security, may not be aware of someone else in their property sharing files and who may accidentally leave their wireless network open to abuse by others.

Under thelegislation, persisten file sharers would be placed on a blacklist, a copy of which could be shared with copyright owners.

The current government has the right to repeal any previous legislation and, during the election campaign, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said that the Digital Economy Act “badly needs to be repealed”.

Despite this the coalition told the BBC it has no plans to repeal it.

“The Digital Economy Act sets out to protect our creative economy from the continued threat of online copyright infringement, which industry estimates costs the creative industries, including creators, £400m per year,” read a statement from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

“We believe measures are consistent with EU legislation and that there are enough safeguards in place to protect the rights of consumers and ISPs and will continue to work on implementing them.”

Only 15-20 users recognized the interference and reacted negatively to it. It goes on by suggesting changes so that the process will be 100% transparent to the user which simply means that they want a system where the user is not knowing that his connection is being hijacked and misused.

I have not had time to read the whole report but it seems like an illegal act to me to inject advertisement on web pages without the users and webmasters consent. In addition to spying on the users about 7000 cookies were dropped as well.

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ISP data deal with former ‘spyware’ boss triggers privacy fears

I hope that there will be an unparalleled public outcry and coverage in Britain and world wide. Spread the word.