Spark, Vodafone and Vocus take different tacks on hate-site 8Chan

Jacinda Ardern with InternetNZ head Jordan Carter at the Christchurch Call summit in May. Photo / File.

COMMENT

Our two largest ISPs, Spark and Vodafone, are taking subtly different tacks on blocking hate-site 8Chan as blocking online.

Meanwhile, the number three player, Vocus (owner of Slingshot, Orcon and Flip) says it will leave the decision up to customers (between them, Spark, Vodafone and Vocus account for around 90 per cent of the home internet market).

The question of who should play cybercop remains a murk and multilayered one, with a number of private and public players weighing in.

The 8chan website hosts message groups and has been attacked for disseminating hate speech from white supremacist groups and inciting violence.

It's webhost, Cloudflare, last week kicked 8Chan off its cloud platform. Cloudflare gritted its teeth after governments in NZ and elsewhere criticised it for keeping the hate site online in the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacres, but the El Paso shooter posting his manifesto on 8Chan was apparently a bridge too far - or, at least, one close enough to home to hurt.

It's still not clear if 8Chan will be able to find a new company to host its website.

But Spark said that if 8Chan does get back online, it will block its customers from accessing it.

Tech commentator Paul Brislen said it should not be Spark's role to police what people see online, or not.

Spark's position was that it was more or less on the same page as Brislen, but that it felt it had been given little choice but to act unilaterally.

"Appropriate agencies of government should put in place a robust policy framework to address the important issues surrounding such material being distributed online and freely available," the company said in a statement.

"But in the absence right now of such a policy framework... we believe the right thing to do right now is for us to block access to 8Chan."

Speaking to the Herald this morning, Vodafone spokeswoman Meera Kaushik took a very similar line, though with the distinction that Vodafone has yet to decide if it would block 8Chan.

"We're watching the situation closely. We will always block where we are required to block. Ideally, 8Chan won't find a new server, because we find much of the content they carry abhorrent and despicable. If they do, we will consider options - bearing in mind that we don't believe, in principle, that it is the role of the ISPs to police the internet.

"In an ideal world, we would have clear government guidelines to deal with these sorts of situations, and specialists such as the Chief Censor would have necessary powers to quickly deal with such hate speech.

"Freedom of speech is an important construct in a progressive society like New Zealand, but much like the government has restrictions around accessing content like child pornography, policy decisions about other forms of objectionable content could also be considered."

Vocus NZ consumer GM Taryn Hamilton had a more clear-cut approach, telling the Herald, "Vocus does not censor or filter the internet, instead we offer an opt-in filtering service to Orcon and Slingshot customers called Family Filter that blocks a wide range of objectionable material. This can be turned on with a single click."

Jordan Carter - head of InternetNZ, which administers the .nz domain - said that post-Christchurch, it's become clear the government needs to make a decision making framework in place about site-blocking.

Carter told the Herald it could be the Chief Censor (his organsiation is still formulating a policy position) but he sees the guiding principle being that the decision should be made by someone who is publicly accountable as human rights vs free speech are debated.

"If we make ad hoc decisions then, there is a constantly shifting landscape where private companies decide what you see online."

Brislen said it's analogous to leaving it to "the Telecom of old to decide which phone calls you can and can't make."

Chief Censor David Shank backed Spark's decision to block any reanimation of 8Chan, and that he will back any other ISP that decides to do the same.

But as things stand, Shanks is focused on rating or banning individual pieces of content - the alleged Christchurch gunman's video and manifesto (or "errorist promotional booklet -" as Shanks more commonly refers to it, not wishing to give it the dignity of mainstream political terminology).

The business of blocking sites is something of a de facto process.

Site blocking did happen in the wake of March 15 as Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees agreed to a government request to temporarily block 8Chan and other hate sites for a week - and then (according to the rumour mill) another week after the government leaned on them.

"Rumour mill" is the operative phrase in that paragraph.

"If we are to have a national stance, it should be done through a good process," Carter said.

He wants that process to include transparency, and a balanced debate about free speech and security - and an acknowledgment of the practical reality that it is almost impossible to stamp out any given piece of content on the internet.

Given that Carter has become the Prime Minister's confidant on cybersecurity issues (he accompanied Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to the Christchurch Call Summit in Paris, and chaired sessions), we could see some progress here.

But in the meantime, a mess of private and public players are involved in site blocking.

ISPs are playing the role of reluctant cops.

Google is blacklisting various organisations, effectively moving them off the mainstream radar (the search giant has blacklisted 8Chan since 2015).

The Department of Internal Affairs is running its DCEFS filter across ISPs including Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees, blocking child exploitation content.

And in April, InternetNZ adopted an interim policy allowing its Domain Name Commission subsidiary to take emergency measures to "lock" a local domain (website address) with harmful content.

"It's a move away from our general position of being content-agnostic," he said.

Carter says InternetNZ took that step after it realised post-March 15 that if the alleged shooter had streamed via a local site, or posted material to an NZ site, that it had no mechanism to immediately deal with it.

The interim policy will be formalised over the next six months - a stretch of time that Carter hopes will also see our government but a much more clear framework in place.

But where ever we go with site-blocking, Carter sees it very much as a last resort.

His organisation pitches it new powers as "extraordinary compliance steps" that will only be used "during extraordinary circumstances."

"It's a debate that's not going to go away," Carter said.

"Especially after what happened in Christchurch, people are paying more attention to the fact the internet is a great big publishing machine - and sometimes it publishes material they don't want to see."