Firewall UK: now in effect
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
The big internet story over the last few days has been how the Internet Watch Foundation has effectively restricted UK access to Wikipedia by putting it on its blacklist of alleged child pornography hosts, which most UK ISPs subscribe to, on account of it showing a 30-year-old album cover which has been available in shops worldwide – and continues to be available – without attracting any legal attention even if it has always been controversial.
As I was busy elsewhere whilst things have been unfolding I was too late to add my own comment, but Andrew Lewin has written about as balanced and informative a piece as possible – link above.
In the olden days, it was an online axiom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; when an entire country can now be blocked off from certain pages on certain sites, or certain sites as a whole, simply by diktat by a government department or non-governmental organisation, that axiom is clearly no longer true.
Whatever your views about the specific image in question, one paragraph of Andrew’s article bears specific attention:
“The Government probably thinks it can get away with it as long as it doesn’t look as though politicians’ fingerprints are anywhere too close, but the IWF will respond to government edicts about what’s right and proper with alacrity. We’ve already heard Hazel Blears attack political blogs as ‘a dangerous corrosion in our political culture’ so how long before the IWF decrees those to be against the law or corrupting our morals and do a blanket ban of any such blogs? Sounds like a perfectly proper, moral argument being presented to do just that, after all. Which could be any blog disagreeing with the party of the day … Now is it starting to sound just a little bit like China?”
And as Andrew concludes:
“So I ask you: think of the number one thing you would hate to lose online. And now realise, there’s a very good chance that it can and will be taken away because of the situation we’re sleepwalking into.
Want to wait till it happens? Or do something about it now?”
But of course, “it can’t happen here”.
