News- UK post bill to disclose child pornography practices of ISPs

Quick news byte from the BNA Internet Law News highlights: the UK has introduced a bill to force ISPs to disclose their child pornography practices.

My understanding of how ISPs have dealt with child pornography is that if their is any defining structure to changes made, it is in being retroactive. Basically, child pornography on the internet started making a lot of headlines during the late 1990s... and when the words 'child pornography' and 'AOL' or 'MSN' started appearing frequently in the same headline, changes were made. Going back to 1997, you can see Kid Shield's survey of ISPs child pornography practices. Pretty abysmal. At the same time, the U.S. F.B.I. and law enforcement agencies were taking action with efforts like operation ripcord and operation innocent images (summaries can be found here, along with other internet child pornography related law efforts). Since that time most major ISPs have made major efforts to ban illegal newsgroups from their servers (I believe there are some notable excptions... and I want to say MCI is one of them, I'll edit this when I find out...)

Right now, that's not my focus. I will write a lot on child pornography regulation in the future, as its one of the main reasons I started this blog, because it looks as though in terms of architectural changes, the internet maintains its status as a bastion of such material.... in the meantime...

The UK law ties pretty nicely in with the whole architecture/free speech concept. In this case the architecture is being created in a few noteworthy ways:

1) Top-down. The regulation in this case is coming from legislation directed at ISPs, NOT the user, and NOT the government. All of the expense is paid for by the ISP, however...

2) The law uses disclosure as punishment. This law is pushed as a first step towards later action. It simply demands disclosure... but just by requiring transparency in the way that ISPs deal with child pornography, its going to encourage them to do something about it. How much bark and how much bite those actions have is something to wait on, but the law itself prescribes no punitive damages.'

Code here, is used to censor illicit and illegal material. It might be a move towards cyberzoning, viewing this as the first zone, which ought not be allowed to be disseminated under any circumstances (where other zones might follow, such as material that ought not to be disseminated to those under 21). It can also be viewed as an extension of current law into the internet, without the sort of 'translation' Lessig talks about. In the Guardian article a few UK talking heads point out the danger in trafficking this material not in terms of harm to the internet consumer, but in terms of harm to the child victims of such horrific acts.

But wait... and here's the rub... what about the huge ongoing debate about virtual child pornography, where images are doctored through visual image manipulation programs to make images appear as if they are real children engaged in sexual activities. So while the law pushes towards a new architecture, it does not take a further step and ask how technology changes the situation, and what the real meaning behind the law is... but that brings me to the #2 most important internet law case on the UCLA site, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, which is just about that. Yea, and you thought this was only a post about some news article, but it comes all the way back to the Supreme Court cases... sa-weet. But that's for a later, albeit equally ignored, post.