The UK governments Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, has ominously proposed that broadband ISPs could introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint.

Vaizey anticipates that internet users could use the "service" to request that any material deemed to be inaccurate or privacy infringing is removed. However we suspect that genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression.


We can't help but feel that Vaizey's final paragraph demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding, much as shown with his support for the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA). Nominet's dispute system is relatively straightforward, where as asking an ISP to investigate any old gripe against something deemed by another to be "inaccurate" is immensely complicated and time consuming.


Ironically Vaizey's argument also works against his proposal by recognising that such information could crop up again almost anywhere and would be very difficult to suppress and control. Physically trying to control general internet content in such a way simply isn't realistic and poses a serious danger to freedom of speech.

At the very least such power should not be placed in the hands of commercial ISPs and should only be used against dangerous content, such as child abuse images or terrorism material; the IWF already does this. In any case an ISP cannot physically delete such content because it does not exist on their networks and blocks are easily circumvented.

UPDATE 2nd November 2010

Comment from the ISPA UK .