 swhx7Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia | reply to KrK
Re: Loss of Safe Harbor = end to Internet You are correct. This has always been the sound basis of the "common carrier" principle.
The "common carrier" principle started at least as early as railroad law in the 19th century U.S.. The deal was that the carrier would lack the right to police what comes and goes (except as necessary to run the service), and in exchange they would not be held liable for contraband or criminals, etc.. Later it was applied to telephone companies. It's obviously a good rule for ISPs for reasons you mention.
If this ISP does end up having to implement and filtering (after any appeals, etc.), the practicalities of it are going to kick them in the be a problem. They'll first have to run *all* the traffic, gigabytes per second, thru some device without slowing all the subscribers' connections unacceptably. Then they have to avoid false positives (which would mean lawsuits in USA) and try to catch a good percentage of offenders. The latter depends on the capabilities of the Audible Magic which frankly seems a bit dubious to me.
And the whole thing will be defeated by encryption. Or are they going to ban VPNs, SSL, SSH, etc.?
The only good news is it's only one ISP for now, and soon, hopefully, the courts will see that this is the wrong approach. |
