Two days after Internet porn-blocking campaigner MP Claire Perry announced ISP filters were not overblocking content, the government has announced it is.

In fact it's such a problem the government is creating a whitelist of sites that should be protected, as well as a system anyone can use to directly report the inadvertent blocking of their site to ISPs or check if their site is affected.

The news has been reported by the BBC, which in December revealed that filters provided by TalkTalk, BT and Sky were all overblocking harmless material including sites on sex education, addiction and several women's abuse charities.

The filter roll-out began last year as a compromise following "Special Advisor on preventing the sexualization and commercialization of childhood" Claire Perry's original default porn-block campaign. That compromise, however, has led to the creation of filters that not only cover hardcore pornography, but hate speech, self-harm, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, dating, nudity, violence, gambling, social networking, file-sharing, games and more. The categories vary depending on the provider, and are designed to be personalized by the account holder depending on the levels of censorship they would like to employ.

Although the major ISPs have complied (or plan to) there has been some pushback, with provider Andrews & Arnold releasing a statement to say, "sorry, for a censored internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea."

Once implemented, problems almost immediately began to be reported and in January Sky's filter blocked the jQuery plugin. The code.jquery.com website serves as a code library for developers to link to, and the mistake meant many sites using it were inaccessible for an hour.

In lieu of this—and despite MP Claire Perry stating on 29 January "if you tick 'yes please', filters will be better, stronger and will not overblock"—the government has announced that rather than taking filters back to the drawing board, a wait-and-see approach will be adopted, whereby the impetus is on sites incorrectly blocked to flag up the issue with ISPs. According to the report by the BBC, a whitelist of all these sites will be drawn up and will include sex education, health, and drug awareness charities.

"Research suggests the amount of inadvertent blocking is low. However, if you are a charity and you deal with teenagers in distress that one or ten matters to you," conceded David Miles, chair of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety's overblocking group. (That's right Perry, there's an entire government group dedicated to investigating the problem.)

The government's call for the system is very much late to the game. Filters were never going to be foolproof—a study carried out by mobile security provider AdaptiveMobile in 2013 found, for instance, that 34 percent of free Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK block sex education sites and 44 percent block religious sites. It was naïve to think this wouldn't happen with the new filters, and therefore seems logical a system would already have been put in place ahead of time to counter problems.

Andy Phippen, professor of social responsibility in information technology at Plymouth University, says that the potential system described by Miles sounds like a "pretty clunky solution" at best. "What if you are a new site wishing to start up, is the onus then on you to check whether your site is blocked by the various filters and then you have to apply to have it unblocked? It strikes me that this is a little bit censorial for a site which isn't doing anything wrong. 'Hello, I've set up a website to help children learn about sexuality, please can you check it to make sure it's not serving porn by mistake'!" he told Wired.co.uk.

This year all major ISPs will have to electronically ask all customers whether they'd like to use the filters, so numbers are expected to rise substantially (for now only new customers are asked). Miles told the BBC: "At the ISP level, on public Wi-Fi and via mobile operators, the UK will be subject to a substantial amount of network-level filtering all of a sudden. That new network-level filtering could increase the level of over-blocking."

So, the inadvertent blocking—or perhaps we should say, much more accurately, the inadvertent web censorship—is just going to get worse. The government does not seem deterred in its course of action, however. The filters have been in the planning for years now, with Perry arguing for total pornography-block opt-out filters in 2010. The government is committed to the cause, and cannot do a U-turn now. Emailing Wired.co.uk, Phippen points out just one of the many reasons the filter system is perhaps not the solution Perry and David Cameron would have us believe it is.

"There is also an issue not with over blocking but with inequality of access," he said. "For example, I am currently sat in the café in Asda at Bodmin writing this. If I try to access the FHM site through its Mumsnet-approved family friendly filtering, it gets blocked. However, I am perfectly at liberty to pop downstairs, purchase a copy of the magazine, then return upstairs to read it (and for everyone to see me reading it). It all seems a little daft..."

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.

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