[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12041063

In response to the government proposal, Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the Ispa industry body, said: "Ispa firmly believes that controls on children's access to the internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down."

Mr Lansman said its members provided parents with many different means of controlling what is accessible via the computers in their homes.

"Online safety is a priority issue for the internet industry and ISPA will be discussing the options available to protect children with Government," he said.

"ISPs currently block child abuse content which is illegal and widely regarded as abhorrent," said Mr Lansman. "Blocking lawful pornography content is less clear cut, will lead to the blocking of access to legitimate content and is only effective in preventing inadvertent access."

BT, the UK's largest ISP, said it would be "happy" to take part in any discussion of the issues, but added: "There are many legal, consumer rights and technical issues that would need to be considered before any new web blocking policy was developed."
Filter failure

"Unfortunately, It's technically not possible to completely block this stuff," said Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at ISP Timico.

He said the sheer volume of pornographic material online and the number of ways that people access it, via the web, file-sharing networks, news groups, discussion boards and the like, made the job impossible.

Mr Davies also feared that any wide-scale attempt to police pornographic content would soon be expanded to include pirated pop songs, films and TV shows.

"If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see," he said.

Fazakerly .....