Italy orders ISPs to block sites

Tue Mar 7 17:13:10 UTC 2006

Neil J. McRae wrote:
> Switzerland has made similar requests and ISPs in .CH have
> deployed acl to block the sites and remove them from DNS.

It was just one single investigation judge who requested this as
a temporary restraint order in a libel case because they couldn't
shut down the server or whole domain name itself.  It didn't work
out at all and almost all ISP's took this to appeal which was then
granted and the order was lifted.  The ISP's were "required" to
block one specific dedicated domain on their resolvers.  Due to this
thing the site in question got a lot of publicity and newspapers also
wrote about ways to get around DNS blocks.

Since then (somewhen in 2002 IIRC) this whole blocking thing is
essentially dead and has never been attempted again.

Before and after this there has been some rah-rah about various cporn-,
racist- and gambling sites with different theoretical approaches by
various pressure groups and government departments.  However before
anything was even remotely implemented a huge outcry ensued and all
of it was quickly shelfed again.  In 2000 or 2001 a jewish holocaust
pressure group partly successfully managed to scare one larger ISP
into IP blocking of some US based server with racist stuff on it.  As
expected the servers moved quickly and the ACL caused various side
effects for later legitimate users of those IP addresses.  From then
on this approach is proven dead as well.

All those attempts so far have been based on the legal theory that
the ISP is liable and participant to whatever is happening on the
Internet and reachable/available through his connection or network
globally.  Needless to say that this theory doesn't fly with the
real judges.

-- 
Andre

> Neil. 
> 
> 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On 
>>Behalf Of Rodney Joffe
>>Sent: 06 March 2006 19:41
>>To: NANOG
>>Subject: Italy orders ISPs to block sites
>>
>>
>>It appears that Italy has ordered Italian ISPs to block 
>>access to a number of Internet Gambling sites. It would be 
>>interesting to see how the Italian ISPs are handling this, 
>>what with dynamic DNS and all that...
> 
> 
> 
> 