Why did the Today Programme invite Claire Perry MP to debate website blocking this morning? Aside from giving Perry an impression of authority on the internet that she does not command — the peg for the discussion was the high court ruling that ISPs block the music file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Perry is leading a campaign to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for access to pornography online. While both issues concern ISPs’ role as gatekeepers, conflating pornography (legal) with copyright infringement (illegal) dangerously muddies the argument – a point that the Internet Service Provider Association’s Nicholas Lansman attempted to make before being defeated by John Humphrys’ bluster.
Despite the government making it clear that it is not interested in introducing default filtering for pornographic websites in a response to Index on Censorship and other civil liberties groups in January, Claire Perry remains insistent that this is what is required. Her scaremongering report (“the whole history of human sexual perversion is only a few clicks away”) calls for network level “opt-in” to force ISPs to provide customers with a “clean internet feed as standard”. In other words, Perry would like the internet to be censored for everyone; in order to access “adult content”, customers would have to choose to receive it.
The first problem with this is – who decides what is adult content? The classification of pornography is a subjective issue: one man’s work of art is another man’s history of sexual perversion. All filtering systems will censor some aspects of culture as pornography. The researcher Seth Finkelstein was the first to decrypt blacklists of pornographic material back in 1995 and found that feminism, gay rights and sex education were all swept up by puritanical filters. It is not possible to filter pornography without interfering with our right to freedom of expression and our access to information.
The second problem is – that Perry and her supporters are calling for the censorship of legal material. This would set a dangerous precedent for censoring any material that we might personally find distasteful or offensive.
And the third problem is an issue that faces the high court as much as any parent who would like the responsibility for monitoring their children’s access to content taken out of their hands. If, as Perry’s report claims, children are now more “tech savvy” than their parents and know how to circumvent device filters, then they will find their way past network filters too.
The blunt tool of high court injunctions and crude filters can only offer limited protection – whether for copyright holders or anxious parents – at the high price of our access to information .
In many parts of the world, the BBC is a voice of reason, providing real information to even out the state propaganda elsewhere on the radio dial. Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently said the BBC World Service gave her a lifeline while she was under house arrest.
If it is considered an important part of the World Service’s mission to impart information to audiences in countries where the media are restricted, then shortwave surely wins out as the more reliable means of communication. It can be jammed, but it cannot be wholly disabled – as the internet and mobile phone networks were in Egypt earlier this year. Shortwave’s adherents are concerned that the World Service is turning away from the people who need it in favour of an audience of ‘opinion-formers’. Its managers claim the contrary, pointing to the maintenance of shortwave in Burma as an example, but a poorer, rural audience is being left behind, and when a country’s dictator takes control of radio broadcasts, the World Service will no longer be available there in any form.
If the BBC decides that it can no longer afford to maintain the infrastructure for shortwave, and begins to close down its transmitter sites around the world as other international broadcasters have done, there will be consequences for its participation in a new form of digital radio called Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM). It is the digital version of shortwave and medium wave, providing high-quality radio with the advantage that it can be transmitted, free from political interference, over great distances. DRM is still in its early stages and receivers are not yet widely available, but India and Russia have both committed to it, and Brazil is thinking about it. The World Service is involved – one of its executives chairs the DRM consortium – but its role might be jeopardised if it pulls out of shortwave since DRM uses the same facilities and frequencies.
Max Mosley, Hugh Tomlinson QC, Suzanne Moore and David Price QC debated privacy, free speech and a feral press at Index on Censorship’s event at the London School of Economics on Tuesday evening, chaired by Index editor Jo Glanville. Reports of the event can be found at:
If you missed it or want to listen again, the video and audio are embedded below:
The debate was held to mark the launch of the latest issue of the Index on Censorship magazine Privacy is dead! Long live privacy, which includes an interview with Sir David Eady, the High Court judge by legal commentator and writer Joshua Rozenberg. The new issue is available now.
The pressure is mounting on ISPs to come up with a means of making the internet safe for children. At a meeting in Westminster this week, hosted by Claire Perry MP, the pro-blocking camp was out in force. Culture minister Ed Vaizey told the meeting that he didn’t care how it was done, he just wanted it done. He warned the ISPs that Parliament was itching for regulation and that they had to get ahead of the curve. He was quick to add that it’s not a free speech issue — no one was proposing that adults would be stopped from accessing content, it was just a matter of giving parents the tools they need. (more…)
