Filtering is not a solution - the real solution is international cooperation
Issue: Finding Solutions to Illegal On-line Activities

Policymakers, legislators, and regulators around the globe want to combat illegal online activities such as child pornography, infringement of intellectual property rights and cybercriminal activities. The Internet Society agrees that these are critical issues to address but we also believe that they must be in ways that do not undermine the global architecture of the Internet or curtail internationally recognized human rights.

The most effective way to combat illegal online activities such as dissemination of child pornography is to attack them at their source. The multi-national environment of the Internet, however, makes stopping the source of illegal content more complicated than simply shutting down a local server. The different actors involved in delivering the source’s content to consumers may be in different countries, with different laws covering what is and is not “illegal content”. Thus, the alternative approach of interfering with the consumption of the content is sometimes suggested. When the national authority is in the same jurisdiction as the consumer of content, blocking consumption seems an easy way around the complexities and overhead of cross- border actions. To that end, national authorities have proposed the implementation of DNS filtering as a way to address content perceived to be illegal within their jurisdiction.

The Internet Society believes that policies and regulations that require the interruption of the DNS infrastructure, whether by filtering results or through domain name seizure have serious deficiencies. These techniques do not solve the problem, interfere with cross-border data flows and services, and undermine the Internet as a single, unified, global communications network. DNS filtering and seizure raise human rights and freedom of expression concerns, and often curtail international principles of rule of law and due process. The negative impact of DNS filtering far outweighs the short-term legal and business benefits.

The Internet Society recognizes that policy makers have an important obligation to address online cybercrime and illegal online content. We encourage technical and policy collaboration to identify solutions based on international cooperation that do not harm the global DNS infrastructure or the overall stability and interoperability of the Internet.

Find out more and download our perspectives paper.