ISPs Oppose EU Intention to Enforce Filtering of Child Abuse Sites

IThe European Internet Services Providers Association (EuroISPA) calls on the European Parliament to reject a legislative proposal that would require ISPs to filter child pornography sites, as such measures are inefficient.

The trade association argues that the only technical measure that can keep such abusive content off the Internet is taking it down at the source.

Enforcing ISP-level blacklists does virtually nothing to stop criminals interested in such materials from accessing it, as all solutions of this sort can be easily bypassed.

"In order to make the Directive on child sexual exploitation as strong as possible, emphasis must be placed on making swift notice and take down of child sexual abuse material focused and effective," EuroISPA President Malcolm Hutty says [pdf].

"Blocking, as an inefficient measure, should be avoided. Law enforcement authorities’ procedures for rapid communication to Internet Hosting Providers of such illegal material must be reviewed and bottlenecks eliminated," he adds.

The ISPs make a good point. Such implementations not only do not have significant benefits, but they are prone to errors that can actually affect users instead of protecting them.

In the Netherlands, a website for a campaign against child abuse was blocked on two separate occasions by ISP filters.

In UK, where most ISPs voluntarily adhere to a blacklist maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a banned Wikipedia page resulted in millions of users being unable to edit the world's free encyclopedia.

Even more, the incident had the exact opposite effect than the desired one. Because of the attention the incident attracted, the article said to contain an abusive image, became one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages.

During a conference last year, a Thai government official admitted that the countrywide blacklists are completely inefficient and their maintenance and enforcement costs a lot of money.

Nevertheless, other governments still think this is a good idea. The French Parliament recently adopted a law allowing the government to request the blocking of websites without a court order.