Would you like yours filtered?

• if I subscribe to a clean feed and I access an illegal site, is my responsibility mitigated and is the ISP liable?;
• if I choose to opt out of a clean feed, am I assumed to want to visit inappropriate sites, would I go onto a watch list by the authorities?;
• what exactly would be censored in a clean feed? Websites that portray child pornography, suicide, rape, violence, racial hate and how to build a thermal nuclear device in your kitchen would be obvious, but what if the government decides to ban sites that do not meet their ideological philosophies?;
• will filtering at the ISP level transfer parental responsibility to the government and ISP’s? Every expert will tell you there is no substitute for parental supervision and guidance;
• by filtering at the ISP level, how does that make us any different to other countries such as China that censor content?; and
• will mandating ISP filtering be another one of this government’s tick in the box tasks only to find six months later that the problems still exist?

A far more effective and cheaper way to filter content is through categorisation. Currently when you register for a website you need to provide certain details such as who will own this site. You can find out this information by visiting sites such as www.whois.net. It would not take much to mandate that all website owners categorise their website. They can nominate if it is an adult site, a news site, a shopping site, a gambling site and so on. All website owners currently utilise a portal to maintain details about their site such as who is the contact person. The category information can easily be incorporated into these portals and the information would be kept on the DNS servers.

It would then be incumbent on providers of browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox make up most of the market) to provide a password-protected facility where you would select which categories you do not wish to view. You can also select whether to view uncategorised or unassigned sites. Anonymous proxy servers are another category that you can select. It would also not take much for browsers to provide different levels of category viewership. For instance, you may not wish your children to visit a breast-feeding information site, but you would.

What is needed is for ICANN to provide a facility to challenge the category of a site. So if you view IHaveHugeHooters.com because it was categorised as an information site, then you would have an avenue to request a re-categorisation. Penalties such as forfeiture of the domain name can be imposed for wrongful categorisation.

However, children accessing inappropriate sites are not their greatest threat. Predators who groom them via chat rooms; bullies who harass and intimidate them via email and mobile phones; nasties who post photos of you taken without your permission; those who spread lies and rumours about you via social network sites; thugs who upload a clip of them beating you up - these are the real problems facing children.

Instead of giving yet another company a wad of cash to purchase their filtering system, the government would be better to address the above problems. But as always, the first and most important line of defence is with the parents. There is no substitute for parental supervision and education.