The boss of broadband ISP TalkTalk UK, Dido Harding, has moved to take the moral high ground today after claiming to be the "only major ISP prepared to attend and answer questions" at a government meeting about the actions that internet providers have taken to protect children online.

The ISP will today attend a Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection, which is being chaired by Claire Perry MP (Conservative). Four of the country's largest internet providers ( TalkTalk , BT , Virgin Media and Sky Broadband ) "were asked to give evidence" but TalkTalk alleges that the other three have apparently declined. Perry is due to report on the results of her inquiry next month.


Last week the same four ISPs agreed to provide new customers (e.g. parents) with an option to block adult web content (here) as part of their subscription process (i.e. "a choice at the point of purchase"); existing customers would also be sent a similar notification.

TalkTalk claims to be the "first ISP to act on parents’ concerns over internet safety" after it invested "significant resources" in developing their free and sometimes controversial (here) network level security service (HomeSafe). In fairness many ISPs have offered parental controls for far longer, although HomeSafe is more aggressive than most third party solutions.

The ISP claims that over 150,000 of its customers have enabled the HomeSafe service since it was first launched in May 2011. TalkTalk states that HomeSafe is also the "only parental control system that allows parents to control how the internet is used across all the devices in their homes". In fairness consumers could also swap their ISP's DNS servers (at the router level) for OpenDNS (free), which would have a similar affect and also includes an option for adult content filtering.

UPDATE 19th October 2011

We contacted both BT and Virgin Media to get their thoughts on TalkTalk's comments. As you might expect both were keen to stress that they had engaged with Ms Perry on many occasions and with all the other (frontbench) Government initiatives (e.g. Bailey Report) on this issue.