IMHO this is a necessary evil. I just wish activists like Cory would have taken the chance to spin it in their favour by using Cleanfeed as a bargaining chip. For the un-initiated, Cleanfeed is the existing censorship system where an unaccountable private company manages a list of websites that are unaccessible to the whole of the UK. That is the real Big Censorship Firewall of Britain, and it’s been in place for years, blocking everything from PirateBay to jihad sites to innocent dentists’ websites.
Now that all major ISPs have an easy option for filtering “generically bad content”, why do we still have Cleanfeed? It would have been a good chip to bargain (“ok, we’ll do the filtering by default, but the non-filtered link should be completely unfettered like it was before Cleanfeed”). Instead, ISPs and activists just screamed censorship, were dismissed in the court of public opinion (who wants to defend the right of pre-teens to access porn?), and then had to implement the filters without getting anything in return (except a vague promise not to legislate on the matter – a promise that can be reneged at any time, of course, especially when/if Tories will get a larger majority).
