Claire Perry, David Cameron’s special advisor on preventing the sexuality and commercialization of childhood, spoke on June 14th about children protection in the Internet on the occasion of the Westminster’s eForum. She considers that the parental filters are not rather successful especially because parents do not use them enough, only 1/3 of the parents, who have children who are less than 10 years old set up the filter, study the Daily Mail. Claire Perry would like to set up a system of opt-out before the end of 2013. This one would consist in introducing a filtering by default and the customer could deactivate manually for a limited time. Claire Perry said that “[In the UK] we will have filters where if you do nothing, the parental filters will come pre-tickets”. This system will be imposed on the new users but also in the older with a retroactive way.
For the government members, the question of the pornography on the Internet is a national problem which it is necessary to supervise. Claire Perry had the same approach in 2010 but this one had never succeeded. On the side of the Internet service providers (ISP), the measure does not convince. They consider that the current technics are successful and respect the neutrality of the Internet. Furthermore, many things were already made like the technology ” activate choice + ” which forces parents to choose use or not a parental filter. They also move forward the technical problems which filters can be posed like the bypassing or having more or less blocking.
Nevertheless, Claire Perry matters on a cooperation of the ISP to apply this new method and doesn’t pass by the Parliament. We could thus think that the project has not much chance to succeed however it is possible because of the pressure that the government puts on the market players. We can find an example through the fact that Google made a commitment to donate 1 million Pounds in one foundation fighting against the pornography of minors at the request of David Cameron.
