Bowdlerising the Web?

Internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK are facing pressure from a number of sources to regulate the content they make available to subscribers.

Two recent cases of sites which have been withdrawn by the providers concerned give a perfect illustration of the issues involved.

The Campaign for Internet Freedom UK, a voluntary cyberliberties group, had its site shut down by its providers, Easynet, on 17 September. They claim that no attempt was made to contact them by e-mail before this action was taken. When they rang Easynet to ask why it had happened, they were told that they had been instructed to shut the site down by the 'Anti-terrorist branch' of the London police.

The problematic section of the site appears to be a feature on the Euskal Herria Journal - a New York-based political publication. The online journal supports Basque independence and has obviously been construed as supporting the terrorist organisation ETA.

The campaign had established a mirror site to allow those interested to view it, after the server hosting the original site had been victim to a deliberate sabotage attempt. Partly encouraged by a campaign in a Spanish newspaper, a number of people had directed 'mail bombs' (or large amounts of meaningless information) at the original server, aiming to make it crash as a protest at ETA's recent assassination of a young politician, Miguel Angel Blanco.

Although they recognise the international condemnation that has followed the killing, freedom-of-speech campaigners argue that the journal still has a right to express the Basque separatist point of view, emphasising that the journal has no formal links whatsoever with the terrorist organisation.

Although the Campaign for Internet Freedom mirror site was shut down, it did not impede them for long. In an indication of how easy it is to counter such a restriction, the campaign simply moved its news operations to the US.

Easynet denies that the police were involved in the decision to shut down the campaign's site. They had, they say, been alerted to the site's content after a critical e-mail and were 'merely clearing up our servers'.

The site has now been reinstated but Easynet, who gave the campaign free space as a recognition of its status as a voluntary organisation, has now said that, in two months' time, they will be required to pay the full commercial rate.

Quite apart from the fact that the campaign will have to find another ISP, they feel this is an indication of a growing climate of conservatism amongst service providers, wary that they will be held responsible for questionable materials contained in their clients' sites. 'If it were not for the prompt support of the Internet community,' they say, 'it is likely that the Web site would have been shut down indefinitely.'

Some providers, they say, 'seek to censor or suspend anything which is remotely controversial, or which does not meet with their moral approval. This is clearly an abuse of their power - Net users should be allowed to make their own judgments.'

The issue of Internet censorship has been less prominent in the UK since the Vice Squad of the Metropolitan Police wrote to Internet service providers last year suggesting that they 'clean up' the content that they made available. But it is clear that some providers have remained wary since then.

A consensus seemed to have been reached when the two leading industry trade associations, Ispa (Internet Providers' Association) and Linx (London Internet Exchange), set up

the regulatory Safety Net Foundation (November 1996 Record p. 554). Both sides saw self-regulation as preferable to legislation of the type that President Clinton tried (and failed) to introduce in the US.

The intention of Safety Net was to enforce a new regime of the three Rs: voluntary Rating of the content of sites; Reporting of illegal material through a new hotline; and Responsibility for ensuring that all reasonable measures are taken to prevent material appearing which breaks existing laws. Ian Taylor, then the Conservative Minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, made approving noises and the DTI endorsed the new watchdog on its Web site.

Since then Safety Net has changed its name to the Internet Watch Foundation and the hotlines have been open since the end of last year. At first they averaged one call a day, but this has since doubled. Most of the calls relate to child pornography, which is available in a limited number of newsgroups and, in most instances, has originated from outside the UK, mainly from the US - rather emphasising the point made by many cyber-liberties campaigners that the presence of illegal material has been exaggerated.

The Chief Executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, David Kerr, has addressed government ministers from Europe, United States, Russia and Japan at the Global Information Networks Conference in Bonn on the subject of plans for a worldwide rating system. This would involve placing a coded label on an Internet site to describe its content. Filtering software would be installed by end-users to set parameters which would prevent access to material they did not want to see.

The Campaign for Internet Freedom, however, is opposed to rating software .

'There is a myth that Internet ratings are like cinema ratings, where you get a warning that material is only suitable for those over 18 and so forth,' says Chris Ellison of Internet Freedom.

'The reality is that content rating makes it possible to control and censor all Net material by embedding hidden tags in Web pages or news postings. It means that the power to view material is taken out of the hands of the recipient and placed in the hands of every other body in the transmission process.'

Meanwhile, a new regulatory body, known as the Internet Content Register (ICR), was formed in September. Claiming to be 'self-financing', the ICR says that it reflects the interests of Internet users and service providers. It announced its presence by having a site known as NetAdult shut down.

Unlike for the Internet Freedom site, there appears to be no intellectual defence for NetAdult. The material which caused the ICR to intervene was crash-scene pictures of the late Princess of Wales. However, the removal of the site illustrates what is becoming known as the Larry Flynt principle, after Milos Foreman's recent film The People vs Larry Flynt. As Foreman illustrates in that picture, the principle of free speech means that there will be some distasteful things being said.

The Internet Freedom Campaign argues that the NetAdult case is an example of a self-appointed body persecuting a site because they feel it is, in their own words, 'disrespectful and distasteful'. ICR succeeded in having the offending site removed within 20 hours of the initial tip-off, with the justification that it infringed the copyright of a daily paper.

'It is clear that ICR will look for any legal mechanism that can be used to shut down a site of which it disapproves,' says Internet Freedom. 'Through the promotion of standards, ICR are in a position to enforce their moral judgements about anything on the Net.'

Don Watson

The Campaign for Internet Freedom: www.netfreedom.org/uk

Internet Content Register: www.internet.org.uk/main.html

Euskal Herria Journal: http://www.easynet.co.uk/cam/censorship/ehj/ehj.html

Internet Watch Foundation: www.iwf.org.uk/

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