Sunday October 6 2024
Swindon & Wiltshire News
You would think that blocking children from accessing porn via the internet is great idea.
We, at Webbed FeetUK, certainly believe that efforts should be made to allow parents to prevent their children from accessing unsuitable material; however it needs to be done properly.
The government’s planned implementation is just as likely to punish thousands of websites that have no connection to pornography as it is to block adult material from minors.
As web designers in Salisbury we know how important your website is to your businesses and have several clients that, without a website, would not have a business.
If you have an eCommerce website, or rely on your site for lead generation, you could lose thousands of pounds a day if it was offline.
My site is unrelated to porn, why am I affected?
It doesn’t matter what your website contains as the majority of websites are hosted on what is known as shared hosting. This means that single servers regularly host over a thousand websites each.
The government plans to block access to all servers that they suspect of containing porn from all† internet connections in the UK (unless users manually opt in).
So if your business website is hosted on the same server as any adult content, then your website will be blocked from all UK users by default.
Consider that Fisherton Street in Salisbury contains an adult shop. Using the same logic as the government will apply to websites, all people would be prevented from visiting any shop, pub or restaurant on that street due to a single adult business.
It’s obvious how this is a bad solution, but this is the exact equivalent of what will happen when the government implement filtering in the way that they plan.
If you are not concerned yet then consider what it is already happening where mobile phone providers have filters are enabled by default.
O2 blocked their clients from accessing a church website for more than four months, ignoring reports of the issue by users, as another unrelated website on the same server had adult content.
What can I do if I am affected?
A real concern is that we have seen no assurances from the government that this collateral damage would be keep to a minimum. Nor have we seen any mention of how they will handle disputes and restore innocent websites quickly.
We have asked John Glen, our local MP, for reassurances on this.
If your site is blocked you can try and contact the responsible department/ISP to get yourself unlisted, the best case you can hope for is that your site would be offline for a short period of time.
Sadly, it may well be that they won’t unblock your website because that would allow people to access the content that it intended to filter.
What is most likely is that you would need to change your server; you could move to another shared host and hope that there won’t be any adult material on there. Ideally you would move your site to a hosting account where only your site uses a single IP address.But this type of hosting is more expensive, and perhaps unnecessary for many smaller websites.
Moving your site is of course another expense. Why should innocent businesses pay for someone else’s actions?
The road to censorship?
In 2008 Turkey banned Richard Dawkins’ site due to complaints that his book, which contests evolution, was offensive.
The Chinese government regularly bans websites it doesn’t approve of. Now it seems that the UK is heading in the same direction.
There have already been leaks suggested that there are already plans to expand what is censored to other topics considered offensive by the government. Where is the line going to be drawn?
† Although this may be limited to just new accounts, there are conflicting stories about who will have the filters enabled by default.
