Breaking the Law to Comply with CIPA

Correction
>>The state has antiporn laws that require domain blocking, which means all sites within any domain containing a bona fide porn site, regardless of the content of those sites, are also blocked.

This is incorrect. ISP’s are choosing to block entire domains, not state law. State law only requires the kiddie pervert site be blocked.
The real issue here is whether we should believe those profit seeking ISP’s.

The Associated Press State & Local Wire
January 8, 2004
Technology can block porn, but some say costs are too high

…The goal seems simple enough: Pennsylvania authorities learn about a child porn Web site and order an Internet provider to block access to it. The problem, though, is the order causes thousands of legal sites to be blocked.

But why can’t Internet providers simply block access to the one offending site and keep the legal ones open?

Experts say the technology exists, but that most Internet service providers, or ISPs, don’t have it. They say its high cost would force small ISPs out of business, and large ones like AOL to spend tens of millions of dollars – all for a weapon effective only until the shadowy figures of Internet kiddie porn change tactics.

A lawsuit being heard this week in federal court in Philadelphia challenges the legality of a 2002 Pennsylvania state law that orders ISPs to block access if child porn is detected on a Web site….

The shutdowns are so vast, experts say, because the easiest and cheapest way ISPs can shut down the offending site is to block a whole Web cluster known as an IP address, which can host thousands of sites.

ISPs instead could shut down individual sites if they had something called a proxy, an expensive piece of blocking hardware.

Tony Thompson, a spokesman for Blue Coat Systems, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that makes proxies, said a $25,000 unit could serve about 10,000 ISP customers, depending on technical factors. Blue Coat provides secure proxies for many top U.S. companies, Thompson said.

“I think we’ll see ISPs looking at proxies for security and control in the future,” he said….