Anti-Piracy Firm Eyes Browser Hijacks Until Fines are Paid → Negative press? What About Liability?

How does the ISP distinguish a casual "browser" HTTP request and a life-saving device (think Negroponte on Neutrality) that uses HTTP to communicate a SOAP-encoded or JSON-encoded message to a monitoring system?

What if the ISP cuts someone off because DHCP/MAC address information/logs are incorrect?

would such tactics even be legal? Sounds like extortion to me.

Extortion, wiretap, various malware laws, etc. Are they going to be getting rubber-stamp legislation for this to happen or are they going to be buying warrants?

That's what I'm thinking. Somebody is going to get sued, and you know that the ISP's lawyers are aware of this. This is a legal disaster waiting to happen.

I suspect that this company will be targeted by hackers if this ever comes to fruition, and probably those capable of far worse than a simple DoS.

you signed a ToS with your ISP that allows them to do just that if they so choose to(up to and including account termination). Go read your ToS for once and stop this bullshit, you already agreed to them performing "network management" in the broadest sense, so you have ZERO right to bitch.

Or, the customer terminates their own contract (aka, cancels service). I have 3 ISP's to pick from. Not loyal to ANY.

What makes you think the other two will not include the same language in their TOS?

If all ISPs do this, then those 3 choices won't matter at all.

Also, I wonder if it will be mandated (either by law, or tax penalty) that all ISPs be mandated to start doing this.

The remediation section of my ISP AUP does not seem to cover "redirection until fee is paid". I suppose the "warning" could be broadly interpreted to mean something like that, but my ISP, on advice of legal counsel (so they claim) does not retain logs beyond, I believe, two weeks.

The default position of ISPs that process warning requests resulting in browser redirection is you are guilty until proven otherwise, that they don't do investigative work to pair IP logs with sites.

Generally you get cut off and they may send an email to you (which is laughable if you have no broadband to receive it) then you have to contact them to restore service. Where the logs come in is if it escalated into a John Doe discovery request for a court proceeding.