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German Minister Announces Plans for Mandatory Web Filtering

By soulxtc

Says purpose is fighting child pornography, like Australia and elsewhere, but is sure to eventually expand to other illegal or offensive material, and perhaps even file-sharing of copyrighted material. Germany's Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen announced recently(GOOGLE TRANSLATION) to that country's legislative body that she was working with her colleagues Wolfgang Schäuble and Michael Glos to combat child pornography on the Internet. By early March they intend to have a "binding agreement" with all the major German ISPs to prevent access to such material. She prefers the term "blocking access" to filtering since it will be done through a list, updated daily by the country's Federal Office of Criminal Investigations (BKA), and submitted to ISPs to be implemented. Critics are rightly concerned that it's a slippery slope towards "blocking" or filtering of other illegal or offensive material.

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on January 16, 2009 (boomark / email).