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Canadian Telco Admits to Blocking Union's Website
Nogami_Saeko writes "Canadian telephone company and ISP "Telus" has admitted that they are blocking all attempts to access a website set up by the employee's union (who is currently "on-strike" or "locked-out", depending on your point of view). Currently no customers of the Telco's ADSL service (or any other ADSL service provider who leases lines) can access the union's webpage. Is it reasonable for an ISP to censor webpages they don't agree with during contract negotiations?"
Of course, Telus just opened up a big can of worms: The Canadian Constitution (1982) guarantees freedom of expression (including on the internet) as a fundamental right:
Seems pretty open and shut - Telus is going to get its ass wupped.The union site is independently hosted, they're blocking the site for their own users. The article doesn't suggest that Telus is hosting the site and Telus even claims the contract with their users says that Telus can block any site for whatever reason they like. They also say the information on the union's site is somehow damaging to Telus and endangers their employees. Also the always loved claim of "they're distributing our proprietary information!" without elaborating on what that information is SCO-style.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The concept of common carrier goes back at least to the early days of railroads. The idea is that a common carrier must take the traffic of anyone who has the money to pay the fare. A common carrier cannot discriminate between customers.
An early example of a common carrier case would be where a railroad refused to carry wheat for farmers. It would only carry wheat for grain companies. The court declared that the railway, being a common carrier, must carry wheat for the farmers. Before that, the grain companies could dictate the price of grain to the farmers. The concept of 'common carrier' can be very powerful.
'Common carrier' has been extended to the telephone companies. That means that the telco cannot refuse you phone service if it is available in your area.
The designation was not sought by the common carriers. It was thrust on them by legislation and common law. The fact that ISPs find it useful is an just lucky for them. In any event, they may not have the choice of whether they are or are not common carriers.
Hmm... This is looking like the UK's infamous Godfrey vs. Demon case all over again, but now with the ISP giving up the should-have-been-common-sense defence Demon tried.
For those who don't know, this was a landmark UK legal ruling from the mid-90s. Godfrey was defamed in newsgroup postings, and sued Demon, a major UK ISP, for hosting those postings. Demon's defence was basically that the postings were made by an unknown individual who wasn't a Demon customer, and they were simply providing access to content accessible to anyone on the Internet, and so shouldn't be held responsible. Essentially, though I don't know whether UK law uses the same term, they were arguing that it was unreasonable for a common carrier to be held responsible for the information they carry.
Demon famously lost, but they lost on the basis that having been told about the defamatory content they should have removed it from their systems, not on the basis that they shouldn't have been hosting it in the first place. This opened up a huge legal can of worms, because it put all ISPs within the jurisdiction in a position of having to remove any offensive content in the face of any complaint or risk being sued, yet then acting as courts and censoring material without giving the source so much as a right to reply. AFAIK, the resulting legal minefield remains unsafe to this day, and ISPs get shaky at the very mention of the case. On the flip side, the case also seems to confirm that ISPs are not to be treated as publishers, with publishers' liabilities for content, just for providing access to material: the "common carrier" principle appears to be respected here.
In today's Canadian version, however, it seems the ISP has already given up any pretense of being a mere provider of access to globally available information. If an active decision was made to kill access to a particular web site, it's hard to see how they didn't just make themselves liable by default for every site they allow access to that contains defamation, kiddie porn, or any other $OFFENSIVE_CONTENT.
How this move was approved by their lawyers, I can't imagine...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.