BT's anti-child porn initiative is fully backed by the British government, the company said, particularly since child pornography was outlawed in Britain in 1978 under the Child Protection Act, which enables the British government to skirt around the issue of free speech rights.
BT says it will use a proprietary filtering software product called Cleanfeed that can block pre-determined URLs or Internet Protocol addresses that connect to web servers known to host child porn sites.
BT claims that Cleanfeed can also block individual pictures on sites. All searches will render a "page cannot be found" window, BT announced. Cleanfeed is a pre-filtered broadband Internet connection that filters at the source and can more easily control content from getting to pre-specified users, in this case, all of BT's subscribers.
The filtering system is currently in beta testing and is expected to be implemented by July. The personal identities of persons surfing for child porn will not be singled out or known by the telecom, the company said. No other Internet service providers or telecoms are currently using anything similar to Cleanfeed, although BT claims to be in licensing discussions with other providers.
Information on web addresses and servers known to be associated with explicit sexual content representing underage children will be provided to BT, and maintained on an ongoing basis, by the Internet Watch Foundation.
Sites that are accidentally blocked by BT that do not contain child porn will be able to appeal the telecom through IWF. Critics of BT's broad-sweeping ban are expecting a large number of sites and hosts to raise a furor when their sites are blocked because of distant or not-so-distant associations with child porn sites.