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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?"
Competing service? IS there one? I know that the only way I can get broadband where I live is through Comcast. I don't have a choice. If I want broadband, I get Comcast.
/usr/games/fortune
Actually they can't because at the point where they take responsibility for the content they're no longer a common carrier.
It's like if I fly American Airlines to Chicago then go murder 800 people. Did AA "aid a criminal"? No they're a common carrier who flies anyone who is eligible.
Similarly if Telus takes up the job of filtering and re-routing specific traffic then they're responsible for [say] viruses or other malware I may stumble upon. They're no longer a common carrier if they deny access to legitimate eligible traffic.
I'm not taking any sides in the strike/business issue. Personally I think quite a few "big corps" are getting away with too much b.s. these days. That said I also think having no job is worse than having a job that doesn't pay fairly.
Though I guess at some point you have to take a stand and demand your share of the proverbial pie.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It's a dangerous move by the telco. Up until now, telecoms companies have tried to argue ( quite rightly IMHO ) that they merely provide the infrastructure, and are not directly responsible for the content of websites that they host.
Here, we have a telecoms company deciding unilateraly to filter a website because they feel like it. If they can filter one, they may find themselves liable to filter all of the others. Imagine the court case
Lawyer: You must block goatse.ca because it is offensive to all mankind
Telco: We can't be expected proactively police and block websites: too much information, freedom of speech, etc, etc,
Lawyer: But what about that time you blocked your union website? You can block "offensive" material when you want to.
Telco: Um...
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.This is the exact reason it was so important to force the guys with the fat pipes to be forced to sublease their pips to other ISPs. If This were Verizon DSL, I could switch to Covad, but if this were Cox cable, (my current provider) I'd just be stuck.
Letting these guys run their businesses this way is tantamount to letting the guys who run the toll roads just not allow vans from their competing companies run on their roads. We'd never allow this on other critical infrastructure, why the heck should we allow it on the internet, THE crictical infrastructure for the 21st century.
TW
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.
- Your book store isn't a regional monopoly. Telus is.
- Your book store isn't a common carrier - Telus is (but may have just jeopardized that status)
- Telus isn't hosting the site - its blocking its paying customers from seeing a site critical of it - this would be like the book store physically preventing its customers from shopping elsewhere for books "because it can"
Telus - their motto is "The future is friendly" - my guess it should be changed to "Telus - The future is Telus-friendly, citizen!" TThe 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.
' Why, then, are so many opposed to the centralization of labor in a similar "corporation" called a union? '
So many of us are opposed to it since it is forced on the workers against their will. At least in the US it is: most union members are part of "closed shops" where it is "join this organization or you will be fired". Much of my opposition to unions as such would vanish if they became legitimate organizations, and only took money from individuals who wanted to contribute it. I detest organizations that operate largely on stolen/extorted money.
This is very different from the capitalists forming a corporation: an operation that requires complete consent of those pooling the resources and signing the documents.
'Clearly, most advocates of free enterprise...'
That is the important thing. Free enterprise. It certainly is not very free if, as a condition of working, you are forced to join an organization that has absolutely nothing to do with your ability or qualifications to do the job.
- Microsoft should disallow access to the Firefox/insert other browsers sites from IE in a default Windows Install
- ISP can block your email because you tell a friend not to use them
- ISP can stop you from reading
/. because they contain a report about them blocking a site
Sure, you can switch to a different ISP if you aren't on a contract or the like. But what if you just think the site is down, and go "Oh well, the union must have pulled it?" Seems like deception to me...The bottom line here is, if a consumer does not like the actions that a corporation is taking, then they can vote with their money by using a competing service.
Great idea, in fact I think I'll string up some cable lines and start a competing service so others can... wait what do you mean I can't? The government has granted them a monopoly on the use of those poles, underground conduits, and publicly owned right of ways to prevent there from being too many lines up? Well now. That's different isn't it? Since they are a government sponsored monopoly I guess the free market can't effectively decide now can it?
Please in future actually to make sure that when you are rabidly espousing unfettered free market economics that situation you are talking about is a free market, not a government sponsored monopoly. They don't have to compete thanks to the government, thus they have to work in the public interest as much as needed. Censoring their competitors or unions is obviously not in the public interest.