Committing $60 million to the project, the European Union has launched a plan to help protect children from porn and purportedly racist Internet sites.
"Children are using the Internet more and more and can come across dangerous content. It's essential to inform parents what tools they can use," EU Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding said at a December 9 news conference.
The four-year program follows an EU project that led to creating hotlines where parents could report “illegal” Internet content. The new program, the EU said, would raise the number of such hotlines, finance filtering technology, and “raise awareness among parents and children.”
The EU did not yet say, however, whether the $60 million would be disbursed among member countries or used at the central EU level.
Data gathered by the European Commission says about 60 percent of children in Scandinavian countries and in Britain, the Netherlands, Estonia, and the Czech Republic surf the Net regularly, but most of their parents may not know the possible risks or who to contact when they spot what they deem harmful content, Reding told the news conference.
She also said the new project’s value could be measured by existing hotlines in eighteen EU states and in Iceland helping law enforcement crack down on child porn and pedophilia networks. She said Spanish law enforcement arrested ninety in November based on such a hotline tip in Spain, the largest known operation against a pedophile network in Spain’s history.
