Spam Email Filtering
Content filtering is currently being done for a variety of reasons. A major one is to filter out spam emails. For years, ISP's and email servers like Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo have used very sophisticated filters called "Blacklists" to block spam email. These generally operate by blocking IP addresses known to originate spam.
While controversy still surrounds internet spam filtering, its use is ubiquitous by ISPs and email hosts like Google's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Google even provides a spam blocking solution to companies and individuals that use Google's commercial enterprise email product
Child Porn Filtering
There are situations where the privacy concerns of content filtering seem to outweigh public policy considerations. Exhibit 1 in this respect is the blocking of child pornography sites. Germany has actually recently enacted legislation1 to do this. Australia seems on its way to doing the same2. Efforts are even underway in the US to block "kiddie" porn sites3.
Pirate Site IP Blocking
Italy's Supreme Court recently ordered ISP blocking of The Pirate Bay, a Swedish BitTorrent indexing site4. In late 2009, the site's four founders were found guilty of massive copyright infringement, assessed muiti-million dollar fines and sentenced to a year in jail. The Italian case recognized all of that in it's finding. For the first time anywhere in the world that we are aware of, an ISP was legally forced to block an pirate IP address. Should that happen around the world, the online theft of intellectual property would pretty much stop in it's tracks and that is what this site is after and what we advocate.
Bogon Filtering
A "Bogon" is an IP address from within certain IP ranges, which IP ranges have been reserved (i.e., not in use) by the ""IANA" As these IP addresses should not be in use, many ISPs automatically block them5.
Voluntary Filtering
There are also many ways one can filter content voluntarily. Corporations routinely control what their employees can access on corporate computers, parents can purchase parental control software to control what sites their kids can surf, and many internet connection devices like routers allow one to filter content based upon offensive keywords or even by building a list of offensive website addresses. Virus blocking software is essentially filtering software.
When filtering is done by an ISP or a major company like Google or Microsoft or Yahoo whose reach and impact over the internet is vast, it raises the whole question of what is referred to as "net neutrality." Click here to go to a discussion on this site of net neutrality and its implications with regard to stopping online theft of intellectual property.
