Don't like it, order the ISPs to block it

Tue Sep 30 00:03:49 UTC 2003

I would be happy just to see ISPs live up to their own published AUP.  The 
Internet would be a MUCH nicer place if this were the case.

Why does the topic of AUP enforcement gravitate towards straw man 
discussions of totalitarian governments? Yeah, I am sure the North Korean 
ISP scene is no fun.  But this is North America.  If a company wines about 
the fact that they dont have a business plan that allows for the 
enforcement of their published rules ("oh, it just costs too much money"), 
they should not BS the public that they have such rules in the first place.

If we want our industry to be self policing, and not policed by the public 
sector, we better start policing ourselves.

         ---Mike

At 02:47 PM 29/09/2003, Sean Donelan wrote:

>Continuing the trend of holding ISPs morally responsible for all things,
>India's Computer Emergency Response Team ordered all ISPs in India to
>block a Yahoo bulletin board for "promoting anti-national news and
>containing material against the government."
>
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60628,00.html
>
>ISPs are not very good at fine grain control.  In India the ISPs
>initially blocked access to all Yahoo discussion group servers.  But
>I'm sure they will improve monitoring of the actions of their subscribers,
>to adapt the blocks.  What's interesting is in order to block less, the
>ISPs will have to invade the privacy of their users' traffic more.
>
>Making the ISP the personal firewall for every user or country is an
>growing concept.  Talk about cost shifting.  Some countries are willing to
>pay for it (e.g. China), increasing the costs.  The Internet may end up
>costing more than private point-to-point lines after ISPs install
>all the firewalls to implement all the personal controls desired by
>governments.