AT&T. Layer 6-8 needed.
Patrick W. Gilmore
patrick at ianai.net
Mon Jul 27 15:34:52 UTC 2009
On Jul 27, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Hiers, David wrote:
> I"m not a lawyer, but I think that the argument goes something like
> this...
>
> The common carriers want to be indemnified from the content they
> carry. In other words, the phone company doesn't want to be held
> liable for the Evil Plot planned over their phone lines. The price
> they pay for indemnification is that they must not care about ANY
> content (including content that competes with content offered by a
> non-carrier division of the common carrier). If they edit SOME
> content, then they are acting in the role of a newspaper editor, and
> have assumed the mantle of responsibility for ALL content.
Famous two cases, Prodigy & Compuserve. Overturned many years ago.
If you edit "some" content you are not automatically liable for all
content.
No ISP is a common carrier. That implies things like "you must
provide service to everyone". Some common carriers get orders like
"you must provide service in $MIDDLE_OF_NOWHERE".
ISPs can, under certain circumstances, get a "mere conduit" style
immunity.
> Carriers can, however, do what they need to do to keep their
> networks running, so they are permitted disrupt traffic that is
> damaging to the network.
>
> The seedy side of all of this is that if a common carrier wants to
> block a particular set of content from a site/network, all they need
> to do is point out some technical badness that comes from the same
> general direction. Since the background radiation of technical
> badness is fairly high from every direction, it's not too hard to
> find a good excuse when you want one.
That, I believe, is much harder. But IANAL.
Hell, I Am Not An ISP even. :)
--
TTFN,
patrick
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