Is it possible to police content that is posted online?
It is extremely difficult. There are many hundreds of millions of pages on the internet; some are hosted on servers in Europe, a great many are hosted abroad. Even if the EU passed a law placing responsibility on EU-based internet service providers (ISPs) to police content on their servers, it would not apply to servers based outside the EU.

What responsibilities do ISPs have at the moment?
At present British ISPs are not liable for illegal content hosted on their servers of which they are unaware. If a site with illegal material – images of child pornography, for instance – is discovered on a British-based server, the server would typically be issued with a take-down order by the Internet Watch Foundation.

Why is there not greater responsibility for ISPs?
ISPs have long argued that they should not be responsible for content on their servers because the volumes of information posted are so vast. Under the E-Commerce directive, an EU regulation that has been implemented in Britain, they enjoy a status known as “mere conduits”, which means that they are liable for prosecution only if they have knowledge of illegal content on their servers and fail to remove it.

What about content that is hosted abroad?
British-based ISPs can use filtering technologies to prevent British users from accessing illegal content hosted elsewhere. BT has one such filter – called “Clean Feed” – which it uses to screen out material once it has been given the URL of an offending website.

What is the Great Firewall of China?
It is a term used to describe the ability of Chinese authorities to monitor and filter the content to which Chinese internet users have access. A search for Tiananmen Square on Google images in China, for instance, yields no results showing the 1989 demonstrations. The Chinese authorities can do this because the country has strict licensing requirements for ISPs.

Couldn’t something similar be implemented here?
At present British-based ISPs do not require a licence to operate. Internet industry sources say that greater regulation would only have the effect of driving the content industry away from Europe, without making the internet any safer for European users.

*Sources: Nominet, the internet registry for .co.uk domain names; Internet Services Providers Association (ISPA), Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

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