Caution about 'new' Internet filter

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 28 Mar 2008

Collaborative Internet filtering (CIF) has advantages over commercial filterware, but commentators caution that it has many pitfalls.

CIF allows communities - such as students, parents or employees - to tag sites as "undesirable" and block them.

Promoters of CIF, including OpenDNS, say the approach is better than commercial software because collaborative communities review sites faster and can have unwanted sites blocked quicker.

The Associated Press (AP) recently reported that OpenDNS offered a CIF service that lets users tag sites under categories such as "gambling", "hate" and "social networking".

"Others can weigh in on whether they agree with those classifications. If there are enough votes, the site gets added to a system used by companies, schools and other organisations to block access," says AP.

The American news agency added that OpenDNS already has a filtering system for "phishing" scam sites using a similar, community-based approach.

But the approach has its critics. John Palfrey, a professor of Internet law at Harvard University, told the AP that community-based filtering may prove more accurate overall, but users aren't always right. "And when they are wrong, the crowds can function as hi-tech lynch mobs," he said. "It is frontier justice, without recourse under classical law."

Marjorie Heins, founder of the Free Expression Policy Project research group, worried that "one ideological group can impose its tastes and ideas by stuffing the digital ballot box and labelling content that other users of the system might not think is objectionable".

OpenDNS responded by saying it has a built-in trust mechanism, giving more weight to users who have submitted accurate tags more often in the past than those who have submitted fewer tags or have never done so.

SA response

World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says: "It's a great idea, but appears to rely heavily on community collaboration, which could in the future undermine commercial potential. This is because, by relying on the open development model, while selling the outcomes of that development, it would open itself to demands by its constituent community that it compensate them or desist from commercial exploitation.

"However, it has a solid client base that suggests it is a sustainable model. In that context, it has the short-term potential of being far superior to the blocking services presently available," he adds.

"Its main revenue stream is the equivalent of Google ads, so traffic is also critical to its success, and it then comes down to how well they are able to drive Internet users to their site and service.

"It is one of thousands of collaborative services that have emerged under the banner of Web 2.0, and it is competing for attention share with all the rest, so the two magic bullets of marketing - budget and brilliance - will be required for it to achieve its potential."

Alan Levin, immediate past president of the Internet Society of SA, says the organisation "strongly supports the use of standards such as the DNS, as a means to make Internet applications work". He says the project is similar to the Wikipedia, which is "another example of a most successful community project."

However, Levin cautions that "while this service looks most promising and appears technically correct, it has limitations and there is no way of guaranteeing a 100% safe Internet. We do not know how this service will be able to sustain itself and we advocate that any parent must understand the implications of children using the Internet."

Levin recommends that parents periodically visit www.commonsensemedia.org to check the latest trends and tips.

Jeremy Matthews, head of Panda Security's sub-Saharan operations, says: "The OpenDNS concept is an interesting approach in a consumer context.

"However, as the filtering system is at the whim of a community of filterers, it essentially forbids implementation of a corporate filtering standard in a business environment," he adds.

"In the corporate sphere, Web content policies are required to be management-driven and thus commercial applications that are totally configurable according to the business's IT policy could never be superseded by a community-oriented filtering system such as OpenDNS."