Online business Toolkit

Story: Wind up the Internet Watch Foundation

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Principle and practice

As the article says, the principle of censoring (or not) is ultimately up to elected governments. Not a problem, as long as they take responsibility for what they do, and act to minimise collateral damage.

At the moment we have IWF acting without warning and refusing to engage in dialogue with Wikimedia, and the big ISPs sloppily blocking a whole article instead of just the image, plus failing to proxy transparently. If they had used X-Forwarded-For headers, most Wikipedia users would never have noticed anything.

This is compounded by the frankly sneaky attempt to call the filtering system voluntary, and IWF an independent organisation. With "only" 95% of the UK subject to filtering, IWF can avoid the judicial review of its actions that a real government agency would face.

I don't see any connection between this and anti-DRM campaigning, other than some of the same people perhaps sharing both interests.

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