Responding to pressure from a Christian group and an initiative led by British Prime Minister David Cameron, Britain’s four biggest internet service providers are going to start offering new subscribers free filtering software when they sign up for new service.
The move is part of a broader effort underway by the British authorities to protect “children from excessive commercialisation and sexualisation,” according to Britain’s Department of Education.
The top four ISPs have 17.6 million broadband subscribers out of 19.2 million, reports The Guardian.
Another major leg of the initiative is the launch of a web site run by UK media regulators called ParentPort where parents can lodge their complaints against companies launching advertising campaigns in any media that they think are “inappropriate.”
Parents irked by something in a television program, an advertisement, a movie, a video game, a newspaper or magazine can go to ParentPort, which is an online gateway to the British media regulators. The portal is meant to enable parents to easily find the appropriate regulator to file a complaint with.
In a statement to the press, Cameron said:
“There is a growing tide of concern up and down the country among parents who, like me, are concerned about our children being exposed to inappropriate advertising and sexual imagery and growing up too early.
I welcome the progress being made, including the ParentPort website being launched today that will give parents a strong voice and a single hub to air their concerns about inappropriate products, adverts or services.
But we must do more, so today I call on businesses and industry to go further and in the new year I will again review progress because I am determined we are really making changes that support parents and protect our children.”
For their part, the four ISPs offer different software packages, but in each case parents are the ones setting the parameters of the filtering and blocking. BT, for example, will offer subscribers access to McAfee Family Protection, which enables parents to filter web sites by categories, or by actual web site addresses themselves. The software also enables the parents to filter Youtube videos, manage their kids’ e-mail contacts and also their social networking activities on their computers (but not on mobile devices.)
The initiative has also produced a new free app created by Vodaphone that enables parents to control their children’s’ use of their mobile devices by limiting the time of the day that they can use the phone, according to the Department of Education.
PCPro has a useful breakdown of the kinds of filtering software the ISPs will offer to new customers as of Tuesday.
The Guardian reports that Cameron’s initiative will hardly have any discernible impact on UK web browsing:
Very few people take out new contracts: during a typical quarter, fewer than 5% of any ISP’s customers change provider. Data from uSwitch suggests about 12 million people have not changed their broadband contract in the past year, and 5 million who have never changed it.
Beyond offering parents the choice to download the free filtering software, it’s hard to see what more the British authorities could or should do to shield kids from porn on the internet without getting into the business of censorship.
Battles over filtering software and protecting children on the internet have raged in the US courts for years.
In 2003 for example, the United States Supreme Court decided that public libraries and schools could only install filters on computers if they enable adults to disable the software upon request.
