Fergie's Tech Blog

ISPs Face New Role in Playing 'Network Police'

Michael Geist:

The support for locking down the Internet revives an old debate - the appropriate role and responsibility of ISPs for the activities that take place on their networks.

As the content owners were promoting legal protection for digital locks in the 1990s, the ISPs were supporting legal frameworks that treated them as the equivalent of common carriers that transferred data across their networks without regard for the content itself.

While that approach ensured that ISPs did not take an active role in monitoring or filtering Internet-based activity, the recent move toward a two-tiered Internet - one in which the ISPs themselves dream of distinguishing between different content as a new revenue source - revived the notion that ISPs could be called upon to play a more active role in monitoring and blocking content.

posted by Fergie @ 1/29/2008 09:30:00 PM