BARRY COLLINS
It’s time to bring the secret internet censors to account.
Who decides what you can and can’t see on the internet? Assuming you’re older than about 13, you may assume you do. You’d be wrong. As a comprehensive report from the Council of Europe revealed recently, more often it’s unaccountable bods at your ISP.
Compiled by the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, the report examined the “law and practice in respect of filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet in the 47 Council of Europe member states”. The UK-specific part – some 32 pages – ends up focusing more on practices than the law, because as the report reveals: most of the people who censor internet content aren’t following any specific legal process. They're a law unto themselves.
UK legislation dealing with what we should and shouldn’t be able to access on the internet is worryingly thin. Successive governments have adopted what’s often called “self-regulation” or “co-operation”. When the police want something removed from the internet because they fear it might incite terrorism, they simply ask ISPs to remove it and they unswervingly comply. Although this is one of the few areas where actual legislation exists to take down inflammatory content, “informal contact between the police and ISPs” means “it has never been necessary to use formal powers under the Terrorism Act 2006”. Not once.
When the Internet Watch Foundation – an independent charity that monitors both child abuse images and “criminally obscene adult content” – wants something removed from the internet, the ISPs similarly remove it.
It’s worrying, however, that when someone complains to an ISP that internet content is “illegal”, the decision whether to block the page or the site is left largely to that ISP. The report states: “Potentially unlawful material is often removed in accordance with Community Standards or Acceptable Terms of Use policies of ISPs, many of which tend not to tolerate any content that is offensive, abusive or indecent, or which promotes or encourages illegal or socially unacceptable or irresponsible behaviour. The threshold for the kind of material that may be subjected to removal is therefore much lower than that which might otherwise be prescribed by law.”
As the Council of Europe goes on to point out, companies such as BT and Sky are under no obligation to respect fundamental human rights, such as free speech. They’re looking after themselves. Moreover, if the complaints department receives dozens, or even hundreds, of requests a day to block something someone would rather wasn’t online, do you think the ISPs are assigning a top lawyer to examine the merits of each case? Of course not. They’ll take it down. The Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002 afford the ISPs with “valuable exemptions from both criminal and civil liability where they act expeditiously to disable access to offending content”. It’s in their best interests to take it down, no questions asked, in the same way they do if the police tell them it’s terrorism or the IWF deem it to be illegal.
Worse still, we largely have no idea what they’re blocking. The IWF – for obvious reasons – doesn’t publish the list of URLs it wants blocked, but then a small proportion of what it’s telling ISPs to block is adult pornography, where illegality isn’t quite as straightforward as images of child abuse. The IWF is apparently considering restricting its remit to child abuse to avoid any ambiguity over its role. Likewise, the police don’t publish a list of the “terrorist” sites it wants removed, making it impossible for anyone to independently verify whether the material being taken down is genuinely inflammatory or merely inconvenient. As for the stuff that ISPs block access to off their own bats, well... who knows how many thousands of perfectly legitimate articles have been taken down without justification. The report notes: “There is no apparent scope for any meaningful assessment, by those demanding or executing the blocking, of requirements such as necessity or proportionality.”
That’s before we even get to the parentalcontrol filters that all of Britain’s major ISPs now deploy – another system that the broadband providers were blackmailed into implementing by the government.
It’s easy for journalists like me to yell “conspiracy” and I accept there’s no perfect solution. If organisations such as the IWF had to apply to the courts each time they wanted to remove child abuse photos, there would be more sick images on the net, and more children being abused.
Yet, as the 27-year cover-up of the Hillsborough tragedy proved, the police shouldn’t decide what we can’t see. Should a YouTube video show the police acting unlawfully during a terrorist raid, can we trust them not to ask for it to be removed on the grounds that it’s “inflammatory”? History, sadly, proves that we can’t.
UK legislation dealing with what we should and shouldn't be able to access on the internet is worryingly thin