In essence, DCMS’s Maria Miller, Claire Perry and David Cameron’s staff have hijacked agreed cabinet policy, pushed for something very different and persuaded ISPs that they should implement significantly worse policies than originally envisaged.

This is what was agreed in December 2012: some kind of compulsory prompt for parents to enable filters, that “does not impose a solution on adult users or non-parents”. Network filtering was never specified, although easy ‘whole home’ solutions were preferred. These could be in the hands of parents, at the router, rather than being placed in dangerously easily reconfigurable centralised ISP equipment.

For whatever reason, DCMS and Perry have been pushing both network filtering and ‘nudge censorship’ onto ISPs. ISPs have agreed; now those of us who think government has got it wrong have nobody clear to pressurise.

ISPs appear to have caved into the overwhelming PR issue that child protection can be, especially when conflated with the separate issue of child abuse images. But by refusing to insist that the government legislate, if it wants such specific provisions, they have opened themselves up to a number of problems:

Are ISPs responsible for incorrect blocks? Are ISPs financially liable for incorrect blocks? What happens when government suggests that ‘terrorist content’ be blocked with not ‘opt out’? Are ISPs responsible for adopting the nonsense ‘preselected censorship’ policy – as it is not official government policy, but apparently the personal position of Claire Perry and DCMS heads such as Maria Miller? Will Claire Perry continue to have a personal veto on the nature of broadband set up screens?

Finally, we would like to know if the Lib Dems are happy for Claire Perry and Cameron to go off piste in this way.

Here’s the official government policy from December, so you can read what ISPs are actually meant to be doing, and how different that appears to be from what they have agreed to with Perry and Miller.