The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Co-Founder of business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, has warned politicians not to "latch on to the notion of being able to control and block the internet". He also singled out the Internet Watch Foundation's ( IWF ) solution, which works with ISPs to block child abuse content online and is frequently cited as an example of how such a system could operate, for not really working at all.

Mr Davies was speaking after his attendance at last week's round table event on music licensing and the internet, which was chaired by the government's Minister of Communications, Ed Vaizey.

The issues discussed included development of the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA), the complexity of music licensing (scalability and costs for all parties) and whether ISPs could do more to tackle websites that promoted "illegal" (i.e. unlawful) p2p file sharing (e.g. blocking, lower search engine rankings via Google etc.)


In fairness the idea of using an IWF style filter would probably be aimed at internet censorship for those who lack the technical know-how to get around such restrictions (i.e. reducing casual piracy). However as Davies reminds, the line between right and wrong could easily become blurred.


It's also worth mentioning that the IWF's filter, despite having easily the best of intentions, can also indirectly cause technical problems and unfair website access restrictions across various different ISPs almost every day of the week. Most people will remember when access to Wikipedia was restricted due to how the IWF's system is implemented (here).

Thankfully the Wikipedia event happened all the way back in 2008. However less popular but still perfectly legitimate websites do frequently run into problems with IWF filter using ISP's, which try to block a specific page or image and end up hampering access to the entire site. Websites that host user content and files, such a Rapidshare and Megaupload, are often those who suffer the most. These problems do get fixed but in some cases that can take awhile.

As before, it's easy to circumvent such filtering and sadly abusers know this too. On the other hand we'd much rather have an easy to avoid system than one that unfairly disconnects entire businesses and families from the internet, which is threatened by the DEA.

At least it'll give the politicians some peace of mind through an illusion of control, until they realise what Iran and China already have, that internet content cannot be completely controlled by a single state.