Andrew Keen: Community self-policing is the way to tackle internet child porn

New Media

What's the best way to fight child pornography and other illegal forms of child abuse on the internet? The British model focuses on the establishment of a democratically self-regulatory body called the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a community hotline to flag inappropriate content. In Australia, in contrast, the government has introduced a trial net filtering system designed from above to stop adults downloading child porn.

Both models are under attack by internet activists. On 4 December, IWF put Wikipedia on its blacklist after the user-generated encyclopedia added the naked image of a young girl on the cover of a 1976 album called Virgin Killer by the German heavy metal band Scorpions, because it contravened the 1978 Protection of Children Act. As many large British ISPs (internet service providers) rely on the IWF list to flag illegal online content, this resulted in those ISPs blocking access to the article – but also stopping UK Wikipedians being able to edit the site. The end result was uproar within the hardline Wikipedia editorial community. Then, five days later, IWF reversed its decision and took Wikipedia's Virgin Killer entry off its list because, it said, the controversy had created unnaturally large public interest in the prepubescent image on the cover of the CD.

In Australia, many internet users are up in arms over the 10,000 sites included in the government's mandatory filter of inappropriate sources of information. The trial of this highly undemocratic "cybersafety plan" has proved so unpopular that it has led to 85,000 people signing an online petition against its implementation, as well as a series of nationwide Facebook-organised mass protests.

I share many Australians' discomfort with the authoritarian arbitrariness of their government's web filtering system. My preference is for the British IWF model and its consensual self-policing by a responsible community of ISPs, mobile operators, charities, politicians, schools, parents and law enforcers. A few months ago, I had lunch with IWF's chief executive Peter Robbins, a genial ex-cop, who has brought his experience at building community partnerships as the Chief Superintendent of Hackney to policing child pornography online. Robbins told me: "The internet is just another community." His achievement of working collaboratively with all the major British ISPs, portals, mobile providers and credit-card companies has resulted in the number of justified complaints about online child pornography that the IWF hotline receives being reduced from 18 per cent to just 1 per cent.

There's a third model, too. That's the Web 2.0-style self-policing model of sites like Wikipedia which, supposedly, are able to use wisdom-of-the-crowd mechanisms to weed out child pornography. But Wikipedia's failure to rid itself of the highly inappropriate Virgin Killer cover art gives me little confidence in this idealistic model. I certainly have more faith in Peter Robbins's self-organising network of industry insiders and his community hotline than I do in a cabal of anonymous, unaccountable Wikipedia contributors.