The department of home affairs has backed away from its plan to fast-track legislation that could have forced Internet service providers to implement a blanket ban on online pornography.

The department met on Thursday morning with the Film and Publications Board, the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), the department of communications, the Independent Communications Authority of SA and the Wireless Application Service Providers’ Association (Waspa), in an attempt to find middle ground with regards to protecting children from Internet-based pornography.

The meeting follows controversial debate around a document published by the Justice Alliance of SA, which the alliance promoted as a draft bill banning online porn.

The document was not adopted by home affairs. However, in July deputy minister Malusi Gigaba said he would fast-track legislation to ban porn on SA computer screens.

Many in industry were concerned that the document drafted by the Justice Alliance would be used as a basis for the proposed legislation. The document proposed harsh penalties for Internet service providers that carried porn on their networks.

However, Dominic Cull, Ispa regulatory advisor and owner of Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions, says Gigaba agreed at Thursday’s meeting that legislative action to prevent online pornography should be a last resort for the department.

Cull says Ispa, Waspa and government authorities will begin looking at other ways to protect children from porn on the Internet.

“We all agreed there is a problem with children accessing unsavoury content, but we discussed other approaches of dealing with the matter,” he says.

Cull says education and marketing was suggested as one possible approach. Providers could also implement voluntary filtering on certain websites if they wanted to.

All the representatives at the meeting decided to put together task teams to investigate alternatives to a blanket ban on Internet porn, Cull says.

He says Ispa has welcomed the approach the department and the Film and Publications Board have taken. “It is now a consultative process.”

The news will come as a relief to Internet service providers concerned that they would have had to find money for costly technologies to block content on their networks. — Candice Jones, TechCentral