UK ISP Service Bans, Un-Bans Wikipedia Page
Last week Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a collaborative service of Britain’s Internet Service Providers, banned a page of Wikipedia that contained a picture of a record album cover (in the UK called the ‘sleeve’) from 1976. The picture showed a young girl, about 10 perhaps, naked, in a sexually suggestive pose.
The ban was done by putting the page on a blacklist that IWF updates twice a day to help British ISPs avoid making potentially illegal images available.
An unintended consequence of the ban was to prevent any British internet users from editing any page on Wikipedia. This consequence comes from the way Wikipedia is set up, to allow its operators to control who has the right to edit its pages (to keep the known loonies out.)
Wikipedia cried loud and long about censorship, joined by many net users. Recently IWF lifted the ban, saying that the image has been around for so long it is more or less unbannable.
Here is an editorial from a senior communications lawyer, and editor of the newsletter Out-Law.com published by a British law firm, saying that the ban should not have been lifted. And here is his earlier piece defending the ban while it was still in effect.
He points out that our laws (and ours are not substantially different from the UK’s) prevent a lot of content from being published, whether because it is criminal or defamatory or infringing of IP or whatever. The question is how best to manage this to minimize over-broad restrictions. He also points out that it is hypocritical of Wikimedia Foundation to criticise British censorship when the principal harmful effect of that censorship is caused by Wikimedia’s own measures to censor its editors.
So: is he right?
One of his points is that the British government made it clear that if the ISPs did not get their own act together to do this filtering, the government would do it for them.
At the same time Australian ISPs have been resisting a government plan to make them aggressively filter content. The usual target, in Australia as in the UK, is child pornography – but do these efforts stop there, or is there function creep…. to other criminal content, to offensive content, to undesirable speech? That story is here (from Internet Law News this morning).
Do we need something like IWF for ISPs in Canada? Is CyberTip it?
If not, then what? Is there a collective remedy of some other kind?
One of the effects of this ban/unban is that the Virgin Killer album cover has become one of the most viewed pages on the web in Europe over the last few days. This flurry may be an irreducible side effect of the worthwhile attempt to block child pornography of a more… revolting type. Or it may be an illustration of the inevitable difficulty we have in drawing a line on the perfectly smooth slope that has unspeakable horrors at one end and “Lewis Carroll’s” photographs of “Alice” somewhere towards the other end — with much modern advertising somewhere in between.
And, yes, while Wikipedia itself censors its content, it isn’t the government, which is the worrying source of real censorship. Neither is the Internet Watch Foundation, the government, of course — but it is much closer to being the state’s proxy in these matters than is Wikipedia.
“He also points out that it is hypocritical of Wikimedia Foundation to criticise British censorship when the principal harmful effect of that censorship is caused by Wikimedia’s own measures to censor its editors.”
“This consequence comes from the way Wikipedia is set up, to allow its operators to control who has the right to edit its pages (to keep the known loonies out.)”
Actually, no. The problems were caused by a combination of this system of restriction for loonies and other “annoying” people and technical incompetence at the British ISPs. There exist techniques that allow the filtering system to tell Wikipedia wich users they’re forwarding the requests for. For some reason, some British providers do not implement them, leading to massive problems for their customers.
Another item of technical incompetence: when they intercepted communications to Wikipedia, some British providers inadvertently intercepted communications to Wikipedia from people who were not their subscribers, which resulted in these people not being able to access Wikipedia at all.
The process is flawed throughout. A private body, unaccountable to nobody except private corporations, with a mission statement that’s basically “we’re covering the Internet providers against accusations”, buildings up a list of “forbidden” content with no debate and without even warning the “forbidden” sites. This list is then used by filtering systems with technical flaws resulting in “side effects”.