I’m a paid Shaw subscriber – they give me my daily Internet smack and so far I’ve been very happy with their services — except for their Internet phone service, but that’s another story. I was surprised to read an article the other day about how Shaw will now be blocking access to a list of sites without letting me know they’re doing it, why, or which sites.
This is, quite simply, censorship – and it is certainly for a good cause. They will be using a blacklist of sites provided by a government-funded operation called Cybertip.ca. They are aiming to reduce (eliminate?) child exploitation on the Internet, and I am 100% behind their goal. Child porn and pornography in general are not aspects of the Internet that should be ignored until they go away – they need to be addressed as the real problems they are.
But this initiative makes me a little uneasy, frankly. I have a few questions that I can’t find answers to:
- Was Shaw intending on telling me about this initiative? I’m paying them for access to the Internet and now, unannounced, they’ll be silently blocking parts of it
- What sites are on this blacklist? As a person affected by it I feel uncomfortable not being able to see what sites are included on it. My experience with blacklists is that inevitably some site ends up blacklisted that shouldn’t have been. How is the site operator to know why their traffic dropped overnight? Email blacklists like this exist in an attempt to stem the flow of Spam emails in the world – another initiative I can get behind. However they are publicly searchable for this very reason – people are put on it accidentally and as a website operator I need to be able to find out if I am listed on any of those lists to take corrective action.
- Who works for Cybertips, and what qualifications are required to become a person who decides whether or not my site is available to 80% of Canadian Internet visitors?
- Since Cybertips can only do this because it is explicitly against the law to consume this trash, what can we expect from the future? What is stopping politicians from deciding to enforce other laws in Canada this way? For example politicians are not known to stand up to powerful lobbying bodies like the Copyright Cartel in Canada (CRIA). This is giving the government a certain degree of control over what sites I can visit on the Internet – where is the guarantee that this will not become a standard practice for enforcing any other laws, whether or not I agree with them?
- Why is the user not given some kind of message as to why the site is not available? It sounds like anyone who tries to access a blacklisted site will simply be pushed off into some kind of DNS dead-end. No special webpage explaining the situation, or giving the person resources to report a problem or miscategorized site. Is this really the best way to handle the problem?
These are just some questions I haven’t been able to find answers to. It’s a frightening article frankly because it feels like the tip of the proverbial iceberg – we’re giving the government of Canada a new level of control over the Canadian experience of the Internet and I don’t think it is being done the right way, assuming it should be done at all.
