The text of the new legislation, designed to enshrine the blocking of selected internet sites in law, was agreed by Germany`s two main political parties - - the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats - on Monday night. It authorized German federal police to put together a block list containing the domain names and IP addresses of websites hosting and linking to child porn. Anyone attempting to visit sites on this list would be redirected by their ISPs to a site hosting a warning message in the form of a red Stop sign.
However, critics of the plan contend that take down would be more effective and are concerned that however well-intentioned a central block list, it would forever be open to abuse by the state. More than 130,000 people signed up to an official online petition against the bill and crashed the German parliament`s web infrastructure on more than one occasion.
In spite of the full weight of the law given to state-sponsored internet blocking, the debate has raised a number of issues that should have relevance to similar debates going on elsewhere around the world.
According to Freude, cyber activist who analyzed a number of block lists as part of the campaign against the law, 250out of 348 providers responded, and 61 sites were taken down within the first 12 hours. The exercise underlines the accusation leveled by objectors, that government and police are more interested in putting in place an apparatus that is capable of controlling web users than in dealing with the real problems of sites that publish abusive material.
According to British legislators, the UK's solution to child abuse images on the internet - the Internet Watch Foundation - is a model for the rest of the world, without demonstrating the least awareness of the serious questions now being raised in respect of the use of block lists.
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