UNITED KINGDOM — Thanks to a British crackdown on all things that might conceivably be inappropriate for children, an increasing number of Web surfers are finding the internet smaller than they remember it. According to The Register, the latest victim to Britain’s child porn blacklist is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which contains as many as 85 billion pages of content dating back to 1996.
Although not yet blocked by all ISPs, many customers of Demon Internet, a London-based telecom owned by Thus, recently discovered that they were not able to access any websites stored in the famous archive. Even searches for the missing sites are useless, returning “not found” messages.
Odds are good that the blockage comes from the Internet Watch Foundation’s web filter. The government-supported organization was designed in order to monitor online pornography and has been more than successful in blocking access to any number of real or imagined threats, including the Wikipedia entry concerning German metal band The Scorpions’ popular 1970s-era Virgin Killer album.
Unfortunately for British internet fans, six ISPs blocked not merely the entry itself – but, at least initially, managed to do an end-run around the entire Wikipedia site.
Within days, copious customer complaints earned the Wikipedia site a reprieve from the blacklist.
The Register reports that a number of Be Unlimited and Virgin customers have also experienced difficulty accessing the Internet Archive – which includes outdated versions of sites run by Parliament, the United Nations, the BBC, Internet Watch Foundation – and both Thus and Demon Internet.
While the matter is under investigation, the IWF has assured The Register that “we only add URLs to our list and blocking is implemented by our member companies to ensure only access to specific URLs is blocked.” Although it admits that certain images stored in the Archive are, indeed, blocked, it insists that these only specific URLs are included in order to avoid “the risk of over blocking or collateral damage.”
