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The coalition government has announced plans to consult with internet service providers on new measures to block online adult material in the UK. Under the plans it would be up to customers to opt in if they wish to view pornography on the internet when they sign up for a broadband contract. Currently most ISPs offer a range of filters and tools that have to be set up by the user to block such content.
The horrendous rampage of Mohamed Merah, the French man who killed north African soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children, has brought all the usual responses from the usual corners. Britain’s “anti-Imperialist” left the Stop The War Coalition’s Lindsey German, decided that it must, must be the fault of French institutional racism, the war in Afghanistan and even the 50th anniversary of the Algerian war. All these apparently excuses for the anti-Semitic murder of children.
The French hard right, led by Marine Le Pen of the Front Nationale, has blamed “politico-religious fundamentalists” and the liberal multiculturalists who apparently enable them.
The government, meanwhile, has blamed the internet.
President Sarkozy announced today, shortly after Merah was killed by French security forces, that people who frequent “websites which support terrorism or call for hate or violence will be punished by the law.”
This is now standard: When east London MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by Roshanara Choudhry in 2010, people were quick to point to YouTube as the source of her radicalisation, an argument I was sceptical of at the time (and remain so).
When Anders Brei vik went on his own spree in Norway, again immediate attention was drawn to his online habits, with some eager to make capital out of the fact he’d read populist writers such as Jeremy Clarkson.
A UK parliamentary report into online radicalisation earlier this year raised the spectre of “Sheikh Google“, playing a role in sending young men and women into ever more extreme and violent positions.
And now Sarkozy’s statement.
The web is always brought up in these issues, for two simple reasons: the fear of the new, and the fact that many in power still feel it is possible to stop the Internet. The reaction to the English riots last summer was a perfect distillation of this: Things are happening on social networks: they must by necessity be bad, and they must be stopped.
The thing that fuels this fervour is the fact that, to some extent, the Internet can be stopped. Sites can be blocked, bandwidth can be squeezed, usage can be monitored.
But blaming the web is as facile as it is attractive. Social unrest did not begin with BlackBerry Messenger. And extremist violence was not invented on the Internet.
Access to the website of independent news agency Ferghana was blocked this week by telecommunications company Kyrgyztelecom in response to a formal request from the Kyrgyz state communications agency. In a resolution made public on 16 June last year, the Kyrgyz parliament called for access to the site to be blocked on the grounds that its coverage of violence in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 had been “subjective” and “provocative”.
On 22 February the Cassation Court of Tunis (Tunisia’s highest court of appeal) overturned a verdict ordering Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to filter pornography on the internet. The court has sent the case back to the Court of Appeal.
On May, 26, 2011, the Court of First Instance issued a ruling ordering the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), to filter X-rated websites. On August, 15, 2011, the ruling was affirmed by the Court of Appeal.
Tunisian free speech advocates fear that blocking access to pornography would be used as pretext to block other content, and would pave the way for a return to internet censorship.
The ATI is technically incapable of undertaking the role of internet censor. This what Moez Chakchouk, CEO of the agency said, in an interview with Index three weeks ago, he said the agency had neither the financial or legal backing to enforce web blocking.
In a press release this afternoon the agency said it will “continue working towards the development of Internet in Tunisia and to act as an IXP (Internet Exchange Point), in a transparent and neutral way towards all”.