But Sarah Hunter, the
website’s head of UK public policy says the proposal would “overblock or
underblock”, while also “deskilling” parents, the Daily Telegraph reports.
“Legislation would be a mistake,” she said.

Having parents to
talk to young people while they were using the web would be a better way to
protect children from seeing inappropriate material online, Ms Hunter claimed.

“The best thing we
can do is make sure parents sit with their children on the internet when they’re very young and have conversations
with older children about sex in general,” she said. And she pointed out that
earlier Government campaigns such as Get Safe Online have previously advocated
that approach.

David Cameron, the
Prime Minister, is said to prefer a system which would encourage parents to make
“an active choice” about what their children can see online when they sign up
for a broadband package.

Currently only one UK
internet service provider, TalkTalk provides a filter at a “network level”, but
Andrew Heaney, the firm’s head of strategy and regulation, admitted that it
could be bypassed by “any intelligent teenager”. He said TalkTalk was not
presenting the technology as a “silver bullet”.

“They do stop some
forms of content but there’s lots more beyond filters that needs to be done,”
said Heaney. “The Government should be encouraging ISPs to offer filters, in the
same way they should be encouraging device manufacturers to offer ways to
protect children; but they shouldn’t be forcing it on people, because that would
be crossing the Rubicon into censorship.”

Ms Hunter said: “We
at Google also believe that children shouldn’t be seeing pornography online.
None of us don’t want children to be safe online. What we disagree with is the
mechanisms by which we protect our children. It’s not that easy and the
solutions that are being discussed are not perfect.”

Reg Bailey, the head
of the Mothers’ Union, was commissioned by Downing Street last year to hold a
review of the sexualisation and commercialisation of
children.

Mr Bailey recommended
the “active choice” compromise for web services. A group of MPs, led by the
Conservative Claire Perry, has called on ministers to go further. Mrs Perry
said: “If British Internet Service Providers introduced ‘opt-in’, we would be
the first country in the world to have such a system. The time for common sense
solutions is here. We have got to act.”

Meanwhile, a UK
police child protection expert has warned that children as young as five need to
be educated about the risks of ‘sexting’ their friends.

Peter Davies, Chief
Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, told MPs that
young children were sending sexually explicit images of themselves to each
other, in a practice known as ‘sexting’, and children under eight need to be
warned about the growing trend.

Mr Davies believes it
is too easy for youngsters to stumble across indecent images on the web which
they could copy themselves through means of sexting, according to the Daily
Mail.

His organisation is
now sending films to schools aimed at children between five and eight, to train
them how to avoid the online dangers.

Giving evidence to
the House of Commons Education Select Committee Mr Davies said there was a lack
of urgency on the part of police to improve things.

He added: “But the
police service doesn’t act on its own, and I think the best leadership for
tackling this on the ground is local leadership.”

He told MPs ‘sexting’
was a growing problem, but only a fraction of incidents where it had “gone
wrong” were reported to police.

An NSPCC study of
sexting found that teenage girls are coming under increasing pressure to text
and email explicit photos of themselves.

The charity said that
more than a third of under-18s are believed to be affected by
it.

According to research
presented at the Westminster Education Forum last year four in ten children
between the ages of 11 and 16 are aware of sexting taking place at their
school.