IGF 2009 - First day - Workshop 93 - Child Online Safety

Workshop 93: Global Path for Ensuring Online Child Protection and Safety. Effective Strategies and Specific Actions. There were a lot of issues regarding the safety of children and youth online that had been mention during the session, including prevention, blacklists effectiveness, filtering and the responsibility of ISPs, digital citizenship, cybercrimes and availability of specific content for children.

It’s important to highlight one topic that has been discussed for a while and it hasn’t still reached a consensus: child porn filtering. Who should decided which sites will be blocked? Should ISP’s companies wait for a governmental decision? AT&T representative, Dorothy Attwood, stated that the companies are very aware of their responsibility of blocking, but the list of which sites should be blocked can’t be theirs. John Carr, eNACSO, mentioned that this argument has been around for a long time and what these companies need is the desire to do that. He also remembered the good example of mobile phone companies and UK ISP’s which have decided to block these pages without any law forcing them to do it.