Internet service providers are not honouring voluntary code of ethics

When we moved into our first house, years and years ago, we needed a phone.

I was away from home a lot in those days, and each time I travelled I left behind a wife and very young children. It took nearly three years to get that phone, and a lot of begging and pleading. In the end, we were told we were lucky. We were a priority case, apparently, because we lived in an area where two local doctors had their practices.

And when we got it, it worked some of the time. We had a four-digit number, and if you wanted to ring somewhere foreign (Dublin, for instance) you had to ask an operator to place the call. As often as not you’d be told there was no line available. But still, it felt like a luxury to have a phone in those days —even though there were fees for installation, fees to rent the piece of equipment, and enormous fees for every call you made.

The other day, I walked into a shop with two bits of identification, and walked out ten minutes later with a new phone, all ready to go. Actually, it’s hardly a phone at all. Sure, it rings when someone wants to call me, but the rest of the time it’s a diary, an alarm clock, a camera and a photo album. It’s also a torch if I get lost in the dark. It will guide me to anywhere I want to go, even speaking the directions as I drive. And it will tell me the weather forecast at my destination.

And that’s only the beginning. I’m carrying around this miracle of technology in my pocket, playing word games with my friends, sending messages to the world through Twitter and Facebook, keeping in touch with friends and family on Gmail, researching, learning, keeping bang up to date with the world around me.

What’s even more miraculous — they gave it to me for nothing. Sure, I signed a contract that guarantees I’ll pay so much a month for unlimited calls and texts and all sorts, but in return they gave me this really cool bit of kit. It’s a notebook, a calculator, a compass, a music centre, a video player.

It can do everything. The people who make them and sell these miracles of technology, and the people who sell services through them, are clearly geniuses. There’s nothing they can’t do.

Except, of course, preventing people damaging themselves with them. They can’t prevent pornography being available at the touch of a button. They can’t prevent self-harm, or bullying. They can’t prevent the exploitation of children.

That’s why they’re resisting the attempts of the British Prime Minister to achieve some kind of regulation. And that’s why they will defeat any attempts to regulate them here for as long as they can.

It’s not practical, they say. It would be contrary to European law, they say. It would impose too many burdens, they say. And anyway, it’s all about freedom of speech, and the avoidance of censorship.

What hypocritical rubbish that all is. What it’s really about is anything that interferes with the primary motive for manufacturing and selling these little pocket miracles — the making of lots and lots of profit.

The real offenders here, of course, are the internet service providers — the same people, by and large, who give the phones away in return for a service contract. They can stop the pornography and the bullying, and they can prevent the internet being used to do harm.

So why won’t they? Well, what they actually do is they operate a voluntary code of practice and ethics. They wrote it themselves — so any rules or regulations in it are imposed by the internet service providers on themselves. That code was published way back in 2002, on the basis that it would be reviewed after a year of operation and updated regularly. It’s actually covered in dust, because it has never been taken down from the shelf since the day it was published.

But it does “oblige” internet service providers — ISPs they’re called — to do certain things. Like, for example, they must include in their contract with customers that the customers may not use the service to “create, host or transmit any unlawful, libellous, abusive, offensive, vulgar or obscene material or engage in activities deliberately calculated to cause unreasonable offence to others”. By putting the clauses in the contracts, the ISPs have fulfilled their obligation. They don’t, of course, have to enforce the clauses.

But even at the most basic level they don’t bother to enforce any of their own rules. There’s a set of “minimum practices” in the code. One of them is this: “Members must include on their websites the www.hotline.ie logo with a link to the www.hotline.ie web-site”.

Hotline.ie is a place you can go to report misuse of the internet. You’d think it might be run by the gardaí, or perhaps some arm of the State that’s concerned with the protection of children. But no, it’s run by the internet service providers themselves. So at least, you’d think, they’d be publicising it on their own websites, as they’re required to do.

There are 24 ISPs signed up to the code of practice. A week or so ago I went to all 24 websites. One of the websites is dead, though it’s still listed. One of them, o2’s website, had an easy to find link to hotline.ie. Not one of the rest of them did. Not one.

How is anyone to believe that these people are prepared to take their responsibilities seriously on a voluntary basis when they won’t even honour the simple bits of their own code? It’s yet another classic example of the old, but true, phrase that self-regulation is no regulation.

Come back to the basic point. People — children especially — are being hurt, day in and day out, by aspects of the internet that range from casually irresponsible to down right evil. The extradition of a man is being sought from our country, right now, on the basis of an allegation that he is the largest purveyor of child pornography in the world. That trade depends for its entire existence on the internet.

To be more accurate, it depends on the willingness of an industry to ignore its own ethical code. As I said at the start of this piece, there is pure genius in the way in which communications technology has been developed in a very short lifetime. We all depend on it, and we’re all fascinated by it. It does great good, and it does great harm.

My columnist colleague Matt Cooper asked a couple of pertinent questions about this at the end of his piece last Friday. “But isn’t the welfare of our children more than merely an economic concern?” he wrote. “Is it not better to try to do something honourably than do nothing at all?”

I totally agree with him, except for one small thing. Every time we pretend that a voluntary code, largely ignored by the very people who drew it up, is meaningful, that’s worse than nothing at all. And that’s really unforgivable.