According to reports the Church of England (CoE) has allegedly threatened to withdraw its investment in the UK's Internet Service Providers (ISP), which is apparently worth "tens of millions", unless they take tougher action to tackle the problem of internet filth (e.g. violent and extreme pornography).

The Daily Mail article suggests that the CoE's ethical investment advisory group, which has already put pressure on supermarkets to be more responsible with how they sell alcohol, are reviewing new guidelines that would take into account how easy such material is to access with modern media.

The church is also unhappy with the alleged failure of laws introduced in 2009, which attached a prison sentence of up to 5 years and an unlimited fine to anybody who was caught viewing website images of rape, torture, extreme sexual violence, bestiality and necrophilia.


It's unsurprising that so few people have been prosecuted because, short of spying upon the homes of every person in the country, it would be extremely difficult to both detect such activity and to accurately identify the guilty individual (i.e. most home broadband connections are shared).

The Internet Watch Foundation ( IWF ), which works with ISPs to both block access to and remove content from websites that feature child sexual abuse content, admits that it has only issued 49 notices to REMOVE such material in the past three years because most of it is hosted outside of the UK (i.e. no jurisdiction).

Meanwhile the CoE's Rev Richard Moy takes the situation to an extreme and believes that people who view soft porn will go on "to progressively more hard-core porn to the point where they are so depraved that they do things that they would never imagine doing". Most young people inevitably find a way of viewing such material and have done for hundreds of years, yet few ever become truly "depraved" as a result.

Curiously the Daily Mail's article seems to ignore last week's commitment by the country's largest ISPs, which all agreed to give customers a clear choice about whether or not to block adult sites (here). The EU has also made a related move to toughen its stance (here) against similar content.

It's critically important to stress that broadband providers cannot completely block access to any website without switching off all web (http) traffic. As a result any blocks or filters imposed are little more than easily bypassed placebos. This is not the ISPs fault; it's just how the internet itself was designed.