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Deutsch: Netzsperren: Schlussfolgerungen der dänischen Ratspräsidentschaft

On 8 June 2012 the Council of Ministers will adopt a “Council Conclusions” document on the creation of a “Global Alliance against Child Sexual Abuse Online”. In line with the Directive adopted last year, the text refers to blocking “where appropriate” of websites. The inclusion of blocking in the text indicates an expectation of failure – a “global alliance” could be expected to effectively remove, identify and prosecute such offences wherever the material was found. It also transplants a concept from EU legislation into an international context, with all of the dangers that this implies. The reference to blocking in the EU Directive is surrounded by safeguards (even if these are not always implemented) and subject to the Charter of Fundamental Rights but in the international environment those safeguards do not apply.

Separately, the Danish and Swedish authorities have been actively lobbying Japan to introduce web blocking. The Swedish Ambassador to Japan attended an event in Tokyo last week to lobby in favour of blocking – touting Sweden's entirely bizarre official “statistics” to support their case. By coincidence, one of the biggest technology providers that works in the blocking area is Netclean, which happens to be Swedish. By a second coincidence, the Swedish EU Commissioner's services fund CIRCAMP, a police-based organisation that also lobbies for web blocking.

The motivations of the Danish Presidency are difficult to guess at – is child abuse being instrumentalised for other policy goals or does the Danish government simply not understand the issue of online child abuse?

No particular attention appears to have been given to the fact that there is no statistical information showing that blocking provides any particular value in the protection of children. Worse still, statistics from EU-funded hotlines show that even the potential value of blocking for child protection reasons is dropping at a precipitous rate. Not alone is the overall number of sites dropping consistently, around half of the sites (and the proportion is growing) are file hosting sites or hacked servers which cannot normally be blocked. For example, blocking the entire Flickr or Microsoft Skydrive services because their services had been abused would clearly be inappropriate.

There has been given no special attention either to the fact that, even with EU protections for fundamental rights, blocking for child abuse material has spread to cover other types of material (gambling and copyright, in particular) in every country where it has been implemented in Europe, except Sweden. Nor has any attention been given in the document to the need for appropriate safeguards, although this may be due to the fact that some EU countries have blocking with no meaningful safeguards – indeed Denmark itself has a blocking system that does not have a legal basis.

The document to be adopted is a set of “Presidency Conclusions.” These are non-binding but must be adopted unanimously. One has to wonder at countries like the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, which had extensive discussions on a national level, which resulted in a decision that blocking should not be implemented. Indeed, Germany was the only country in the Council discussions to raise any concerns at all about this initiative. It seems little more than reckless to permit the EU's credibility to be attached to a strategy to be spread around the world which is not good enough to be implemented in many of its own Member States.

Ironically, while the EU continues to push directionlessly for blocking in any forum that it can find, it makes no efforts to reflect on improving its domestic measures. There has been basically no evolution of policy or thinking on either blocking or “notice and takedown” in the past decade while in the US the procedures around notice and takedown have been completely reformed to a positive effect.

Statistics from the Internet Watch Foundation annual reports for the last number of years
http://www.iwf.org.uk

Netclean
http://www.netclean.com

Sweden's blocking page
http://195.54.122.220/sv.html

CIRCAMP
http://www.circamp.eu

(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)