Google recently
gave £1 million to the Internet Watch Foundation, a nominal charity and de facto arm of the British government, which is responsible for maintaining a blacklist of 'potentially criminal' URLs - over 100,000 to date.
Masquerading as a child abuse charity the IWF's remit has extended to blocking
'obscene' material and 'extreme pornography', including consensual BDSM play and other ethical and harmless activity; 'non-photographic images', i.e. cartoons; as well as political speech judged to 'incite racial hatred'. Its blacklist is secret and the foundation itself is utterly unaccountable to anybody.
Sites blocked by the IWF have included such notorious hotbeds of criminal activity as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, and the technology used by ISPs to implement its blacklist has already been hijacked by the British Phonographic Industry and applied to the ongoing blockade of the Pirate Bay.
Over 95% of UK internet users are currently being victimised by the IWF and their government has been pushing hard for several years to smother the remaining 5%. Just part of its effort to force ISPs to censor all content by default.
Load Comments...
Discuss...
Enable JavaScript to submit a comment.