Several European governments are coming together and pondering the development of an Internet blacklist:
Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected terrorist content under the European Commission’s budding ‘Clean IT’ project.
The project aims to create a text that commits the internet industry (web hosts, search engines and ISPs, among others) to helping governments weed out content that incites acts of terror.
As I often discuss counter-economics I’m sure my site would certainly qualify as “inciting acts of terror” as the “black market” has already been tied to terrorism. Needless to say this site will likely be blacklisted in Europe if this censorship project moves forward. What’s interesting is the claim that such a blacklist would be used to block sites that “incite acts of terror” in one paragraph and is claimed to be used to report “illegal sites” in the next:
Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to ‘flag’ content they believe to be illegal when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.
Which is it? Will the reporting mechanism be used solely for sites “inciting acts of terror” or will it be used to report all illegal content? I guarantee it will be the latter.
If this goes through I’ll feel a bit bad for the people tasked with sifting through all of the reported sites because I intent on reporting every site I go to. That should keep the thought police busy.