- guardian.co.uk, Thursday April 20 2000 16.45 BST
This addresses fundamental issues for the future of the internet. The Internet Watch Foundation, IWF, is at the heart of the debate as it was set up by internet service providers, or ISPs, to help police criminal content - primarily child pornography - and avoid a threat to civil liberties.
There are demonstrably workable means for government to police the internet but the means are very different from those used in older media: they should be through partnership and co-regulation with industry rather than authoritarian enforcement.
The British government and law enforcement agencies were perhaps the first to realise they would achieve their objectives by working with ISPs. There is now an established pattern of public reporting of suspect content through a hotline, followed by a notice and take-down procedures to remove content regarded as illegal. The hotline has been used as a model in Europe, the United States and Australia.
Labelling and filtering addresses the threat of content that is potentially harmful to children. E-commerce poses big problems but the size and economics of the market make willing partners of government, industry and law enforcement in the effort to provide safe trading.
In each of the emerging areas of concern governments are increasingly obliged to rely on co-regulatory means of operation. The net's architecture allows individual users to choose how they use it. Most have an offshore option to avoid unreasonable restraints, so government policing in the forms suggested pose little threat to civil liberties.
The greatest danger to civil liberties arises if governments do not learn how to achieve adequate regulation by new means and are panicked into imposing authoritarian measures. My conclusion contradicts the motion: there is a severe threat to civil liberties if governments do not find workable ways to police the internet.
