Dominique Lazanski: Britain can't afford to filter content online at home, whilst promoting an open internet policy abroad

Dominique Lazanski is Head of Digital Policy at the TaxPayers' Alliance.

David Cameron is putting his full support behind the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection (pdf) that proposes an opt-in mechanism for viewing pornography. Essentially there will be filtering of legal pornography unless a user requests otherwise.

It is no surprise that I support all of the arguments against this idea. The unintended consequences of website filter will “risk damaging legitimate businesses and undermining cyber security while further perpetuating the myth that this is an easy technological solution to a complex problem” according to Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch, and I completely agree. There is no end of legitimate technical reasons not to filter websites and such arguments are what ultimately brought down the SOPA bill in the USA earlier this year.

But aside from the technical issues and, of course, the fact that parents – and not the government – should decide how to raise their own children and educate them about being online, there is a more important international issue which is not being discussed.  The International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs for short) are being renegotiated at an international level. The proposals that are coming out of the UK right now on website filtering and blocking could undermine this entire process for the UK.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a treaty-based organisation that is a specialised agency of the United Nations. The ITU has 193 countries in its membership and some of these members have proposed imposing binding mandates, exercising control over, for instance, regulating mobile Internet roaming charges, regulating charges for internet backbone peering, removing the administration of domain names from ICANN and controlling the development of internet architecture. We would see the impact of these new controls immediately. No longer would developers work together in a voluntary capacity through the Internet Engineering Task Force and no longer would we see the emergence of new top level domains, including the possibility of .London, as discussed in the Forum earlier this month. The spontaneous and collaborative nature of the internet would slow to a crawl or be put offline altogether.

Dominique Lazanski: Ofcom's new guidelines are common-sense, light-touch regulation

Dominique Lazanski is Head of Digital Policy at the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Yesterday, Ofcom released its guidance on net neutrality for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the UK. Ofcom will be taking a wait-and-see approach to any possible regulation and encourages customer education on the subject. This is a big win for ISPs, content providers, UKplc and the economy as a whole.

Net neutrality is the idea that all bits traveling over networks known as the Internet should be treated equally. In theory this might sound like a good idea, but Internet traffic management is a necessary part of what ISPs do that they can deliver more bandwidth intensive items like video and less bandwidth intensive items like email efficiently. ISPs should also be able to prioritise urgent Internet traffic, such as calls from a doctor in the Scottish Highlands to a hospital in London for lifesaving surgical advice. Managing Internet traffic is what ISPs have done and do as part of this network management.

Heavy-handed regulation promoting net neutrality, like that introduced in the US and the Netherlands, will force ISPs to stop doing what they do – manage and build Internet infrastructure – and take time and money away from this. In the UK’s fragile economy, it is essential that ISPs continue to build out their networks either through 4G spectrum deployment or rural broadband. Net neutrality would have only impacted and even prevented this from happening.

Dominique Lazanski: How the EU 'cookie' directive is impacting the UK

Dominique Lazanski is Technology Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Yesterday, amendments to the EU’s e-Privacy Directive came into force.  The e-Privacy Directive was created in the early 2000s to address the issues of privacy and data protection. The amendments, made in 2009, reflect changes in technology. It is the change to the law around web cookies that is most contentious, but now in force as of yesterday morning.

Cookies are web-based pieces of text stored on a web browser that allow for the browser to remember you when you are shopping, reading or doing just about any other kind of surfing online. They help the browser to remember your details, what is in your online shopping basket, or that you are a return reader to ConservativeHome. They are a part of how web sites and web browsers work, to put it simply.

The amendments now in force require that users of any websites consent to tracking before they continue browsing on a particular website. In many ways it is any absurd thing to mandate through law because every time a user needs to read a website up may pop some kind of opt-in box requesting that you tick ‘yes’.

Dominique Lazanski: Parents, not the Government, should be responsible for keeping their children safe online

Dominique Lazanski is Technology Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Yesterday, Claire Perry MP wrote an article for the Telegraph on her campaign to protect children online. Since late last year, Ms. Perry has advocated more online protection for children under the age of 18 who may just be accessing and looking at porn. Ms. Perry wrote in her article yesterday:

“Increasingly, children use the internet to look at porn. Almost a quarter of teenagers say that they view sexual images online, while one in three 10-year-olds have seen such material. Worryingly, the unregulated and international nature of the web mean[s] that children are easily able to watch violent and hardcore images with one or two clicks, either intentionally or as a result of an innocent search.”

Ms. Perry is right and there is no doubt that pornographic images have become easier to access than in previous generations. And it is a concern for parents who are often less savvy and less technically able than their kids are online. However, regulating the Internet as Ms. Perry suggests is not the answer.

Ms. Perry has long advocated for an opt-in to porn feature that would be technically managed by ISPs. Many mobile phone carriers already do this and many of us may have experienced an inability to access certain websites on a smart phone without a phone call to customer service. This is the kind of opt-in situation Ms. Perry is talking about here for broadband services and she has advocated that it should be standard across all ISPs so that anyone in general will have to phone to remove the blocking or filtering taking place.

Dominique Lazanski: The Reality of the Internet Porn Lock

By Dominique Lazanski, Senior Fellow, Technology Policy at Big Brother Watch and a Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

The Sunday Times reports (£) today that Ed Vaizey plans to meet with all major internet service providers (ISPs) next month in order to secure plans for blocking pornography at the source.  Instead of parents and adults alike opting-out of viewing pornography material at the end user level, any user of the Internet will have to actively opt-in to view and download pornography at home.

Though the details are still yet to be discussed in detail, the idea is that all end users will be able to opt in if they feel so inclined.  TalkTalk is introducing a free service next year in which users can automatically opt-in or out of certain types of content that is rated in the way that films are today.  Other providers, like Virgin’s mobile service, already ask users to opt in to seeing explicit material.  A spokesperson for Virgin said, “We are already able to block sites [on the mobile service] so it would be possible to do the same on the Internet.”

I applaud this measure not because it is a government initiative, but because ISPs and their customers are arriving at a solution to unwanted content and spam.  In effect, Ed Vaizey is reiterating his support for solutions to modern day Internet issues.  ISPs are listening to their customers – and particularly parents – and responding to their needs without the need for government legislation and regulation.  And I suspect that at the meeting next month between Ed Vaizey and ISPs, many of those ISPs will report back on technical developments and offerings already in place.

Content filtering, spam identification, and traffic management all play a part in how ISPs prevent unwanted content, and mostly pornography, from showing up on a customer’s computer.  It is really important to point out that if net neutrality, the idea that all Internet traffic is created equally, were to be put into place here in the UK then it would be difficult for ISPs to manage its traffic and provide services like the ones mentioned above to the general pubic.

So while some critics say this plan might hamper freedom of speech, I think that this is the best approach to manage what can be often overwhelming choices for customers.  ISPs offer different levels of content access to their customers and customers can opt-in and opt-out of content depending on their needs.  It is the best possible solution especially if Ed Vaizey and the government supports it, but doesn’t get in the way of ISPs and customers alike.