Censor-tive
by Peter Bradwell
Any story around censorship is touch-paper stuff in the context of the Internet. And the issue has really flared up since yesterday with the news that the Internet Watch Foundation has been involved in blocking some Wikipedia content - with the specific target the cover image of an album by German rockers Scorpions. There's some good summaries of the situation at the Guardian and Open Rights Group.
Like most people, I find it difficult to get wound up about trying to stop people making and seeing child pornography (let's leave for a moment whether this case is indeed thusly indecent). So why the fuss? The problem seems to lie largely in how the blocking is done, who decides what content is blocked, and where the boundaries of what is covered by these tactics lie now, and might in the future:
1. How it works: There's a helpful diagram over on BoingBoing of how the system works. In simple terms, Internet Service Providers have a filtering system that allows them to check whether the site or page someone is trying to visit is on a watch list provided by the IWF. It is an ISP level system. One unintended affect of how this works is that many UK users of Wikipedia are apparently unable to edit content and create new accounts across the site. How appropriate is this kind of filtering mechanism?
2. Its remit: Do we suspect that this kind of censorship or regulation - watch lists and ISP filtering - will begin to apply to other forms of content? If so, what type, and how will the decision making process work? On what basis will these decisions be taken? It must be tempting to use this to at least regulate other kinds of online behaviour - illegal file sharing, for example.
In our Video Republic pamphlet, we argued that its important to find new ways of regulating that are community led - better flagging sytems and so on - and don't interfere with the benefits of openness and a lack of top down editing. That's easier to defend and work through when the issue is not child porn. So this seems like a very useful case mainly because it highlights the problems of any network level regulatory system for online content, rather than simply being a question of whether we are over-reacting to an album cover from the 1970s.
Update: Here's a good piece on the story from Channel 4, including a comment from Becky Hogge at the Open Rights Group.