Posted: 21st Jul, 2004 By: MarkJ
ISP AOL UK's director of communications, Jonathan Lambeth, has criticised BT's Cleanfeed technology, which was yesterday reported to have blocked a mass of attempts to access child porn sites:
According to Lambeth, it's relatively easy for BT Retail to offer this service because it only uses BT's own network for its Internet services. Other ISPs who resell services from a range of telcos wouldn't be able to offer Cleanfeed unless all their suppliers had embraced it.
There is also the possibility of legal action if a legitimate site was added to the blacklist by mistake, he said. "If all ISPs blocked that site and it suffered a huge dip in traffic, they potentially could sue for lack of business," Lambeth suggested.
"It needs to be about more than just PR," said Lambeth, who pointed out that many child-pornography rings used other technologies than just Web sites, such as email, FTP and peer-to-peer.Somehow we doubt that anybody running a child porn site is going to sue for lack of business, yet it's easy to see how a provider could get something wrong and end up blocking a legal site. More @
ZDNet.