China drops controversial web filtering scheme

UK is in no place to be smug

China is a well known bad boy of censorship, but the UK is in no position to be smug. Most (over 90%) of UK internet access is censored at at the ISP level by the IWF.

They do a good job of filtering out kiddie porn, but they also filter out anything that they consider to be "potentially illegal" even if no actual decision has been reached by any legal authority. We all remember the Wikipedia fiasco, don't we?

We also only have their word for it that they are only filtering out "bad stuff". The Chinese software was supposed to be filtering out porn, yet its list of key words had more political terms than anything else. Until the IWF becomes transparent and publicly accountable I will have no choice but to suspect that they are covering up all kinds of stuff that they arbitrarily decide is wrong. All that it takes is for a couple of homophobes or a couple of people with vested interests to get on to the IWF and we could find gay sites going off line for supposedly being pornographic (Remember when Amazon did something similar), or we could find sites critisizing big business going off line for allegedly encouraging eco terrorism.

The point is that while the IWF remains a closed shop it could be up to anything and the public wouldn't know anything about it unless they blocked a big name site (Ala the Scorpions page on Wikipedia).

By Perfectblue97 on 14 Aug 2009

I agree Perfectblue97. No one, well except paedophiles themselves, would object to stopping child porn.

If the IWF remit ended there I'd not worry so much. But they also block things considered racist. Now unlike paedophilia what is or isn't racist does vary with your viewpoint. Some would argue a debate on immigration is racist - should the IWF block that too?

By cyberindie on 14 Aug 2009