Ofcom: Most New ISP Customers Reject Porn Filters

UNITED KINGDOM—Judging from yesterday's official release of UK regulator Ofcom's second of three reports on the rollout of the nation's "family-friendly network level filtering service," the government has overestimated the interest new ISP subscribers would have in the filtering scheme agreed to by the country's ISPs as part of Prime Minister David Cameron's promise to protect the nation's children from internet porn.  It turns out that the percentage of new subscribers opting in for the porn filter hovers in the single digits for all but one of the four large fixed line internet service providers—BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media— assessed by the report. TalkTalk, which rolled its filter out the earliest (May 2011), reported an adoption rate of 36 percent. BT, which started its filter in December 2013, reported that 9 percent of new subscribers opted to filter, Sky (Nov. 2013) reported 8 percent adoption, and Virgin Media, whose filter was not implemented until Feb. 2014, after the government deadline, reported that only 4 percent of new subscribers chose to filter at the network level. Of the four ISPs, all but Virgin reported that 100 percent of all new subscribers had been presented with the decision to choose to filter or not, as was mandated by the government. Virgin Media, on the other hand, could only lay claim to 35 percent of new customers being presented with the choice. According to the Ofcom report, "The majority of new installations involve an engineer visit. Virgin Media understands that many engineers avoid the full broadband activation process altogether on the grounds that the process adds to the installation time. As a consequence, Virgin Media estimates that since the launch of WebSafe in February 2014, only around 35 percent of new customers had been presented with an unavoidable choice about implementing the filtering service. Neither Child Safe nor Virus Safe is active without the customer specifically consenting to turning the filters on." The ISP said that it would up its game by implementing "a number of additional opportunities for the customer to see the choice and chose its network level filtering product." Focus now shifts to existing customers, all of whom will by one means or another be contacted by the ISPs in order to make their "unavoidable choice." The current report outlines the various methods each ISP intends to use to get the attention of their subscribers, including the use of pop-ups, email and prompts that present themselves to customers when they log into account management or other services. Porn is only one category of content available for filtering by the four leading ISPs, which in fact only share categories for pornography, suicide and self harm, hacking and drugs. All also share the crime, violence and hate category, except that the TalkTalk filter does not cover crime specifically. Other categories include dating, gambling, games and even social networking, to name a few. The only ISP that offers filtering for each of the 14 categories listed in the report is BT. The Ofcom report can be read here.  Image: BT Parental Controls prompt.