The western world takes Internet freedom for granted and expects to be able to access any website from anywhere, of course countries such as China are known for having state-controlled firewalls, but it now seems like this may be a possibility in the United Kingdom. The Open Rights Group has received a letter from UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, confirming that discussions are presently being held between Internet Service Providers (ISP's) and media industry rights holders about the 'self-regulatory' site-blocking measures for the Digital Economy Act (DEA) which was introduced in 2010.
Vaizey mentions in his letter that consumer rights groups will be invited, "I recognise that it is very important that consumer interests are considered very carefully, and we will be inviting consumer representative groups to participate in future discussions on the issue."
Currently the Act is delayed until 2012 but if this new notion gets made law then popular websites like ThePirateBay will no longer be accessible from within the UK border. One of the industry rights holders has previously said that "cheaper than notice sending would be site blocking. We're more interested in site blocking [than mass notification letters]. We don't want to target end users, [the mass notification system] is long winded – we want something now."
Fortunately ISP's have no control over content which does not explicitly exist on their own networks, instead they would have to rely on various tricks in order to fulfill the restriction, however most of these are easily bypassed using proxy services, vps accounts and other methods.
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