Hey UK, I Heard You Have a Filter Problem.

Do you remember the last time the Clean Feed hit the Australian news? I most certainly don’t but luckily I blogged about it every time it happened and the last time it crossed my path was over 2 years ago when some Australian ISPs decided to voluntarily block 500 sites. Suffice to say the No Clean Feed movement, something which I was an active part of, was completely successful and we haven’t had to speak of it again. Indeed I thought that any modern society looking to implement something like Australia’s Internet Filter would see just how politically toxic it was and then think twice about it.

Turns out I was wrong.

David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has announced a policy that looks eerily similar to the Clean Feed policy that Senator Conroy introduced all those years ago. Essentially it’s a pornography filter and while at first glance it looks like it might be opt-in it’s in fact going to be the dreaded opt-out, meaning that every Internet user in the UK will have their connection filtered unless they ask nicely for their ISP to stop. The rhetoric surrounding the policy is also eerily similar to the Clean Feed with a heavy focus on the impacts to children and attempting to curb the child pornography. If I didn’t know any better I’d say that they’d straight up copied everything about the Clean Feed and simply changed a few words here and there to make it their own. Predictably the Internet is in an uproar about this and the policy is getting all the scrutiny it deserves.

Cameron thinks that his filter will be infallible (gosh where have I heard that before) and that “it should not be the case that technically literate children can just flick the filters off at the click of a mouse without anyone knowing”. Now forgetting for a second that most parents aren’t exactly technically inclined it wouldn’t take a child genius to work out that a proxy site like HideMyAss was all that was required to bypass a filter like that. Sure you could then block those VPN sites but, hang on a second, they’re legitimate sites with completely legal use cases. So you either resign yourself to having an ineffectual filter or you go down that rather ugly path where you make anything that can bypass it illegal, something which I’m sure a lot of businesses would have something to say about.

Had Cameron done a little bit of homework he would have found out that he could win the same number of votes without alienating the tech community by saying that the filter would be opt-in. I’ve said many times in the past that I support such a policy because it gives concerned parents an easy option whilst leaving the majority of Internet users untouched. It’s also better for the ISPs as they can plan a filtering solution based on a minority of their users, rather than having to scale up a solution that has to support their entire user base. For some reason though the default position for policies like this seems to be always-on and anything else is seen as a weak compromise. Funnily enough the thing that would supposedly make such a system more effective will end up killing it in the end, even if Cameron doesn’t see it now.

So, people of the UK, it’s now time for you to do what us Australian’s did and rally together to fight Cameron’s filter policy. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, nor without any significant effort, but after 3 years we managed to kill our Clean Feed policy for good and made talk of it so politically toxic that neither party dares mention it again. You’ll now have to do the same: contacting members of parliament, staging demonstrations and, most important of all, not letting up until they drop this policy in favor of the next voting winning scheme.

We’ve got your back, fellow members of the Commonwealth.