Jim from the UK Open Rights Group sez, “It seems Cameron and Perry have ignored official government policy, invented their own policy and forced it onto UK ISPs. With no legislation, and no complaints from Lib Dem MPS or the ISPs, we have completely unaccountable “nudge censorship” being forced onto the UK population with no debate.”
This is what was agreed in December 2012: some kind of compulsory prompt for parents to enable filters, that “does not impose a solution on adult users or non-parents”. Network filtering was never specified, although easy ‘whole home’ solutions were preferred. These could be in the hands of parents, at the router, rather than being placed in dangerously easily reconfigurable centralised ISP equipment.
For whatever reason, DCMS and Perry have been pushing both network filtering and ‘nudge censorship’ onto ISPs. ISPs have agreed; now those of us who think government has got it wrong have nobody clear to pressurise.
ISPs appear to have caved into the overwhelming PR issue that child protection can be, especially when conflated with the separate issue of child abuse images. But by refusing to insist that the government legislate, if it wants such specific provisions, they have opened themselves up to a number of problems
Who exactly is responsible for ‘nudge censorship’?
(Thanks, Jim!)