The Internet is roughly two decades old now, and since the beginning, accessing pornography was among its top uses. Sharing pirated music wasn’t far behind.
But thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, it’s now easier for children to unintentionally stumble across porn, says Conservative MP Joy Smith, who wants to see Canada follow the U.K.’s lead by forcing Canadian telecoms and Internet service providers (ISPs) to block all adult websites in Canada.
And thanks to increasing bandwidth, it’s easier to download large files, like movies, resulting in mounting pressure on Canada – through international agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership – to clamp down on digital piracy.
In either case, it would fall to Canadian telecoms and ISPs to implement costly controls – deep packet inspection, for example – to more closely scrutinize what Canadians are doing online so they can be stopped from doing things like surfing porn or getting Game of Thrones free through bit torrent sites.
“We’re definitely big fans of net neutrality and wouldn’t be keen on doing it, period,” said Chris Allen, president of ABC Communications, which provides Internet service to rural areas of B.C. “But if forced, then the only way it could possibly work is if the government was paying us to do that.
“Smaller ISPs – especially the mom-and pop-sized guys – they can’t afford a $50,000 deep packet inspection device to stick on their network and, on top of that, have to report and filter and throttle and run call centres so people can opt into their porn. It creates a whole bunch of extra bureaucracy over the delivery of the service that, frankly, would put some smaller operators out of business.”
Smith said her proposal to have Canada follow the U.K. in blocking porn is not a private member’s bill yet. But she has been lobbying fellow parliamentarians in the hope of following the U.K.’s lead. Whereas one had to actively look for porn in the past, she said it now pops up unbidden.
“Very violent porn pops up at will, and you can have small kids, or teenage kids, doing their homework, watching whatever, and all of a sudden this pops up,” Smith told Business in Vancouver. “They’re not watching it because they want to watch it, they’re watching it because it’s there – it pops up. It’s being advertised. It’s big business.”
Under Smith’s proposal, Canadians would still be able to surf for porn, but they would have to contact their provider and ask for their Internet protocol (IP) address to be unblocked.
“When ordering cable TV, you have to opt in to receive adult channels,” Smith said in an op-ed in July. “Why should the Internet be any different?”
But TV and the Internet are very different. TV is a one-way media – broadcasts are easy to control. Traffic on the Internet is much more difficult to control.
Filtering any kind of content onthe Internet – whether it’s porn or piracy – requires a deep scrutiny of all Internet traffic. And it would not prevent tech-savvy adolescents from accessing adult content.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers can be used to essentially move an IP address outside the country to circumvent the blocks. Teens in Canada already use them to access movie and music sites that are geo-blocked in Canada.
Trans-Pacific Partnership puts pirates in its sights
As for piracy, both the Pirate Party of Canada and Vancouver-based Internet watchdog OpenMedia have been ringing alarm bells over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), an international trade agreement involving 12 nations.
According to documents leaked on WikiLeaks, one proposed provision on copyright protection would place greater liability on Internet service providers (ISPs) to clamp down on illegal file sharing.
“It would create new liabilities and costs for Internet service providers that they would no doubt pass on to their customers,” said OpenMedia executive director Steve Anderson. “It could force ISPs and web companies to act as Internet cops, monitoring content and even taking entire websites offline.”
Christopher Parsons, a post-doctorate fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which does global research on information and communication technology, said the TPP would not be as draconian as some critics make it out to be. But he shares their concerns about blocking web content, and he thinks a law similar to the U.K.’s would face significant legal challenges from Canadian civil liberties groups and privacy watchdogs.
“It starts turning ISPs very explicitly into quasi-agents of the state,” Parsons said. “I imagine you’d see some sort of legal challenge.”
One of the concerns over arming ISPs with censorship tools is that once the tools are in place, they can be extended to other areas that governments might find objectionable. For example, many governments are already unhappy with WikiLeaks. Should they decide the site threatens national interests, it would be easy enough to add it to a block list.
When the U.K. first introduced its porn censoring bill, it was initially sold as just targeting pornography. But the David Cameron government recently announced it would also require extremist websites to be added to the block list.
“The laws that are passed today will establish the infrastructure that parties can use in the future as well,” Parsons said. “It might make perfect sense at the moment for certain things to be blocked, according to the governing party. But if they were to lose the next election and another party came in and they had a different agenda, you could use the same technologies to block things that are in line with their normative views.”
