Safer surfing - the EU's €50m priority

The European Union wants to clean up the net and remove its harmful content - from racist and paedophile sites to spam - and is prepared to spend €50m to get the project moving.

The EU's 'Safer Internet' initiative will spread the funding over four years, kicking off in 2005 and running until 2008. It aims to make surfing less dangerous for children, in particular.

The project will focus on four main points of action: fighting illegal sites, tacking harmful content, promoting a safer internet and raising awareness over the dangers. One new development for Europe will be the creation of a network of hotlines to report illegal content on the web, with information passed on and offenders dealt with.

The EU will also be getting behind awareness campaigns to educate teachers, parents and children on the potential risks of surfing the internet, with a particular emphasis on "personalised, interactive and mobile applications", after fears that the advent of 3G could make it even easier for paedophiles to gain access to children and for the kids themselves to use unsuitable sites, such as chatrooms, gambling or porn, unsupervised.

According to an EU survey on the issue, it may be a bigger problem than most parents realise. An EU Safety, Awareness, Facts and Tools showed that while 14 per cent of children using chatrooms have actually got together with someone they met online, only four per cent of parents believe that their children have.

"Children should have the right to use the internet freely, to chat, to learn or to play games," enterprise and information society commissioner Erkki Liikanen said in a statement. "But to move freely online, children must be protected from risks of being exploited or cheated by adults."

As well as helping users fight the web's worst wrongdoers, the Commission will be summoning technology to help clean up the net - putting its money where its mouth is by funding filtering technology and an exchange of best-practice tips and information on preventing spam, as well as helping users to find the best anti-spam technology.

That doesn't mean that the EU plans on tinkering with the net. It says it "supports a self-regulatory approach" but intends to facilitate the exchange of information between different countries' regulatory bodies with a platform called the Safer Internet Forum.