Ministers have stepped back from forcing telecommunications companies to filter websites for online pornography after claiming that parents rejected the idea in a government-sponsored consultation.
A report released on Friday by the department for education and the home office instead said that internet service providers will be asked to advise and steer parents towards making an “active choice” by offering software that blocks out pornography and self-harming sites.
The apparent climbdown follows a 10-week public consultation process. David Cameron had indicated as recently as last month that he wanted firms to follow the lead of TalkTalk, which was the first big name internet service provider to introduce network-level filtering of websites for its customers.
The report, released with little fanfare on Friday, said: “It is… clear that in accepting that responsibility, parents want to be in control, and that it would be easier for them to use the online safety tools available to them if they could learn more about those tools.
“They also want information about internet safety risks and what to do about them. There was no great appetite among parents for the introduction of default filtering of the internet by their ISP: only 35 percent of the parents who responded favoured that approach.
There were even smaller proportions of parents who favoured an approach which simply asked them what they would like their children to access on the internet, with no default settings (13 percent) or a system that combines the latter approach with default filtering(15 percent),” the report said.
The Daily Mail has led a campaign against children’s access to pornography. The newspaper suggested last month that Cameron was about to call for a tightening up of parental controls online.
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