Intellectual Property Law

Filtering, American-Style: Verizon, Sprint, Time Warner Cable to Block Child Porn

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Filtering: it’s not just for China anymore. (Or Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea…) Internet censorship via technological means is a growing trend, and now it’s surfaced in the U.S. Three major ISPs have agreed, under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, to block access to Usenet groups and Web sites that contain child pornography images. The ISPs did so when faced with the threat of legal action - charges of “fraud and deceptive business practices,” according to the New York Times. Details - especially technical ones - are skimpy so far. It appears that the ISPs will filter based on a blacklist compiled by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children; another tool is a database of child porn images that can be used to detect new sites / newsgroups (which, presumably, would be added to the block list).

This effort is, predictably, being hailed as a leap forward in the fight against child abuse and exploitation. (The problem on-line is real; University of Cambridge researchers Tyler Moore and Richard Clayton found that it takes hosting companies over 30 days to remove child porn sites - while they take down financial scams in less than 4 hours.) But there are worrisome aspects of this effort.

I’ve been working on a paper that explores how we can assess whether a given country’s Internet filtering (= censorship) system should be viewed as legitimate. (A draft version, admittedly incomplete, is available for download on SSRN; I welcome comments and feedback.) An important aspect of this effort is to denormalize or problematize filtering. It seems natural, obvious, and completely appropriate to most U.S. citizens to block child porn, or copyrighted material. But it’s just as obvious to French citizens that hate speech should be banned (as Brigitte Bardot learned), or to many in the United Arab Emirates that Israel’s top-level domain should be filtered, or to Thais that videos mocking their King should be blocked. We don’t get far if we merely apply our own preferences to other countries’ efforts: unsurprisingly, states that ban what we dislike, and permit what we favor, appear legitimate.

Full post as published by Info/Law on June 10, 2008 (boomark / email).