Hundreds of Sites Blocked By Canadian ISP

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot reported on the blockage of a union website by Telus, a leading Canadian ISP. Since that story, the company has restored access but the fallout continues. The move may lead to new ISP regulations in Canada and a study by the OpenNet Initiative has found that by blocking the union site, Telus also blocked an additional 766 websites including a breast cancer fundraising site." From the article: "While there are a number of different ways to block access to Web sites, the method Telus chose to block the Voices for Change site -- blocking its IP address -- produced massive collateral filtering. Filtering by IP address is efficient since ISPs can quickly and effectively block access to the target site using their existing routing technology. Many ISPs already block certain IP addresses to combat spam and viruses. Large networks, like Telus, have mechanisms in place to block IP addresses almost instantaneously, simply by updating their routers with a "block list" of addresses. However, it is common for many different, unrelated Web sites to share the same IP address."

Comments

Illegal, reckles, and dangerous.

[TripMaster Monkey]

From The OpenNet Initiative PDF:

Section 36 of the [Canadian Telecommunications] Act states that, without the approval of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, a "Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning of telecommunications carried by it for the public," and Section 27(2) of the Act prohibits a Canadian character, in providing a telecommunications service, from "unjustly discriminat[ing] or giv[ing] an undue or unreasonble preference toward any person, includ[ing] itself, or subject[ing] any person to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage.

Clearly, Telus violated the Canadian Telecommunications Act by their heavy-handed disconnection of www.voices-for-change.com. This alone should be grounds for revocation of their license, but the incidental blocking of an additional 766 unrelated websites is even more reprehensible than their intended censorship.

Public Outcry

[Emperor Cezar]

The ISP was pretty much forced to take down the block because of public outcry. No one wants to do business with an ISP that does things like that. With regulation the Canadian government has two options:

a) Force them to let everything through, but this means they can't block virus speading sites, etc

b) Only allow them to block what the regulators seem fit. Which puts what you see and can't see into the hands of beurocrats. This would cover all ISPs in Canada so you can't switch to one that does block stuff you want it to (Porn if you have little kids, etc.)

I personally prefer to let people hurt them in the wallet when they pull crap like this. Corporations take more notice when something hurts them in the wallet.

Re:Hypocrisy in action.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Collateral damage happens, like it or not.

No, it doesn't. Collateral damage happens when the sysadmin is question is lazy and/or ignorant. It would have been easy to block access to only www.voices-for-change.com, and no others, but instead they chose to block the entire IP address. Either they wanted to pass the blockage off as an accidental outage (and failed) or the sysadmin just couldn't be bothered to do the extra work, and just blocked an entire IP in the router. Either way, it's despicable.