ISP monitoring our virtual life

Essay by pinkittyCollege, Undergraduate March 2009

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The deliberation about the role of ISPs monitoring children pornography is between Alan Davidson, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Michael Godwin, policy fellow of the Center Democracy and Technology, and Bruce Taylor, President and Chief Counsel at the National Law Center for children and families. Whereas Taylor holds that ISPs should penalize pornographers and block their sites, using filters to monitor the online traffic and their activities, Davidson and Godwin reply that even the smartest filtering technique would not be able to determine if the traffic is officially permitted or not. What is more, the National Law Center for children and families inculpates the Internet Service Providers for not taking the right preventative measure to overthrow this situation. I believe that ISPs shouldn’t be held responsible for the expansion of Internet pornography. Being on ISPs side doesn’t mean that people should allow children pornography, but the way that the National Law Center thinks to fight against pornographers, by monitoring people’s virtual life, is an invasion of privacy.

In his article “The invisible pornographers”, Bruce Taylor argues that ISPs aren’t preventing the pornography on their websites. He sustains that ISPs should take some precautions to make browsing online more eligible even for minor’s usage. He also criticizes ISPs for permitting access to the children in such improper web pages. He claims that ISPs must find a way out by using their “search and filtering technologies” (Taylor, 2002, p.B5) to discover child pornographers and stalkers on their system and definitely forbid them. But, as Taylor states, “One ISP refused to remove child porn from its own server even after police told them in writing where it was…they didn’t want to censor it” (Taylor, 2002, p.B5), and this makes us understand that even if ISPs get...