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Will ISP Web Content Filtering Continue To Grow?
unixluv writes to tell us that another ISP is testing web content filtering and content substitution software. One example sees a system message that is pre-pended to an existing web page. While it seems innocent enough, is this the wave of the future? Will your ISP censor or alter your web experience at will? There have been many instances of content filtering lately and it seems to be a popular idea on the other side of the fence.
Goddamn, I hate Rogers. At least they're being honest with their bandwidth caps now. Unfortunately, I find myself in the position of having to switch fairly soon to a cable-based service as the phone lines in this apartment are horribly old and low-quality. My experience with TekSavvy has been great from a customer service standpoint but it seems any DSL line I get here will be subject to the same problems, problems my landlord is almost certainly not willing to fix.
I know about 3web but I've heard some fairly bad things as well. Can anyone recommend some non-DSL, high speed (5+ MBPS), preferably low-cost ISPs in the London, Ontario area?
On another note, I'm almost certain this is going to cause unforeseen problems for Rogers, or at least their customers. I'm glad I don't do tech support for them...
And as pointed out in TFA, this has some pretty evil possibilities. Barring the obvious censorship issues, who's to prevent Rogers from replacing, say, Google Adsense scripts with their own ads? They already do it with Bell ads on their digital cable. Don't believe me? If you have Rogers digital cable, you'll notice that there are some ads that play on every channel that has commercials. If you look closely at the start of these ads, you'll usually see about a half second of another ad, quickly replaced by the Rogers network-wide one. These preempted ads are usually for Bell ExpressVu, Rogers' main (satellite) competitor.
But, like most cable companies, they remain because they have a monopoly on the cable market. Ultimately, this is the problem that needs to be solved before the rest, and I don't see it happening any time soon.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
With Beer! and Hookers!
The code being appended breaking websites in some browsers? People disabling javascript?
Next Question?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I would love it if my ISP could just email me or text me to let me know of problems. With 90% of the cell phones out there capable of receiving texts and at least half capable of getting email it seems like the logical choice. Any ISP that dares to intrude on my web surfing will get the boot.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
SSL
There should be no ambiguity here. They have no right to modify that information. What they are doing is tantamount to forgery, perjury and impersonation. Sue the hell out of them until they stop or go bankrupt.
Get ready for the encrypted web.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Here's a solution: https:///
This corresponds to what Microsoft wants to do: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/043200
In each case, we and our equipment are seen as walking ATMs, providing dollars to the corporate interests. Two things, if there was a "right to privacy", it would block both Microsoft and the ISPs. Net neutrality would be more problematic, but it could be argued that rewriting web pages is interferring with the content providers (Google).
Answer those, and you have the answer to your question.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Or the cleartext signed one. "Opera has detected that the signature of this web page is invalid. Please disable Norton Internet Security, you idiot."
Sites that don't want to risk having their ads stripped or replaced will shift to SSL.
When enough big-name sites do that the economic incentive to insert or replace ads will drop off.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Just to be clear, what Comcast has been caught at is not content-filtering. They have been breaking connections based on the *type of the connection*, not the content contained therein. Let's call what Comcast is doing by a more descriptive name. I propose Context Filtering. This way, we have QoS (throttling throughput while leaving it operational, etc.), Content-Filtering (watching the data going through and responding to the actual data) and Context-Filtering (watching the type of connection and reacting to that, such as SMTP connections, HTTP connections, BitTorrent connections, etc.) These terms are not interoperable, and shouldn't be treated as such.
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
ISPs make their money for overselling services. People overusing those resources, getting themselves hacked by Russian trojans, or otherwise reducing that price advantage means ISPs will not make enough profit to outcompete each other.
Expect more filtering. Expect them to turn you in if you cause problems. Expect less technical support. There's just no money in it.
Google will go absolutely ape if an ISP filters THEIR ads. Expect lawsuit city if that one happens... or Google just throwing some cash out there and building out their open ISP network.
this is the first I have heard of content subsitution.
Each person should review the Terms of Service (ToS) they accepted (and most likely continue accept each time they use their Internet connection) and look to see what is stated there. Also, realize that the ISP's will update it with nearly no notice. Inside of those agreements that you agree to generally through your use of their services you'll find all kinds of interesting things. For example, here is some relevant quotes from Verizon's ToS in Section 14.4:
"You hereby consent to Verizon's monitoring of your Internet connection and network performance, and the access to and adjustment of your computer settings, as they relate to the Service, Software, or other services, which we may offer from time to time."
Who is to say that "adjustment of your computer settings" doesn't include adjustment of .html files being delivered to you. Oh and just in case that wasn't strong enough, in Section 15.8 you get:
"15.8 You agree that Verizon assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, quality completeness, usefulness or value of any Content, data, documents, graphics, images, information, advice, or opinion contained in any emails, message boards, chat rooms or community services, or in any other public services, and does not endorse any advice or opinion contained therein. Verizon does not monitor or control such services, although we reserve the right to do so. Verizon may take any action we deem appropriate, in our sole discretion, to maintain the high quality of our Service and to protect others and ourselves."
Similar allowances are inComcast's Acceptable Use Policy. Basically, folks have to understand what they are signing up for and how often it can change.
There are companies out there today, Phorm for example, who already are working with ISPs around the world in order to put their gear in the ISP networks to create targeting advertising based on all Internet habits, not just specific sites with specific cookies or the like. So far they all seem to be giving you an ability to Opt Out, but that appears to be a way to create good will for the moment. If there was case law backing them up, who knows if they'd continue the practice.
Seriously, how does this apply to the subject at hand?
Good effort on the rant. It even seems original which is always nice. I may not agree with your content, but you come across as articulate and educated.
Might I suggest moving to a more civilised country?
... of course they will filter, censor and tell us what to do, think and believe. Thats what Freedom is all about!
Adding the header is making a derivative work of the original web page. So is substituting one add for another. I can't think of any reasonable fair use argument that would prevent this from being a copyright violation. The web sites visited by the ISP's subscribers likely have a cause of action against the ISP. And the ad substitution victims likely could prove significant damages.
I haven't fully thought through the contractual implications of this yet (as between the ISP and the ISP's subscribers), but there's almost certainly something there, too.
I'd wager an underground modern BBS systems would start to popup again, if things get to far out of hand.
Say hello to dial-up all over again!!
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
The reason why ISPs can get away with copying resources into their caches is because they are "incidental copies", where permission for copying is implied for the purpose of normal operation. Web developers can apply Cache-Control: no-transform to indicate that changes of this nature should not take place. It seems to me that any ISP that alters such pages would be creating unauthorised derivative works and permission would not be implied to copy, thus making them guilty of copyright infringement.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Is the moment websites start going to all HTTPS.
I kind of doubt anyone likes their website to have content in it inserted by an ISP. The big sites like Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc, will just turn on HTTPS for all content. The only reason they haven't done it yet is because there's little reason to do so, and it takes some extra processing time.
AccountKiller
You have the option to use an ISP like Copowi who guarantees network neutrality.
Spread the word. Even if you don't use Copowi, get in the habit of asking potential ISPs if they guarantee (or offer) network neutrality. (If they start to weasel out, say "guaranteed network neutrality, yes or no?".)
This should be a front-burner issue for ISPs. We should be making every Joe Schmoe in the country asking their ISP "do you have that network neutrality thing, or will you be messin' with my internets?". We're lucky that we have a catchy, positive-sounding name for it, and there's no catchy positive name for its opposite. Use that!
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Some ISP's will filter content. The consumer will either accept it, or use a different ISP.
The market ultimately dictates policy in these matters.
Well, it's almost the law, and proably will be soon enough, to require ISPs to spy on your every message, request and download.
The House just passed the "SAFE Act" to force all ISPs to take responsibility for all content they host or transport, even if they don't moderate it, in direct contradiction of the landmark CDA [wikipedia.org] which let ISPs be like telcos always have. Lots of child molesters trap children in telephone conversations, but the telco has no liability. Because holding them responsible requires tapping every conversation, which is what the SAFE Act (not the one with the same name that sanely deregulated crypto export) now does: forces ISPs to monitor and analyze the content of your every Internet communication.
When the Senate passes it, then the president signs it, every ISP will be forced to spy on your every online move (just like the government does - hi, Dick!). Just the threat of enforcement will be enough to get ISPs to do whatever the government wants.
--
make install -not war
Mirror of the hi-res picture: http://forum.pigvj.se/uploadfiler/37/rogers-google.jpg OK, i admit putting i there mostly to mess with my friends web hotel account. :)
Dammit, "Ernestine"! Geraldine was the Flip Wilson character of the same era.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Individuals could make their own internet. Who says you have to keep your wifi closed. Everyone open it up, link it together. We could bypass the ISPs all together.
Couldn't a website claim copyright infringement because the ISP has basically taken their work and made a derived version of it with new content on it?
Deleted
Actually if anything it'll have the opposite effect on content monitoring and filtering. The SAFE act doesn't require ISPs to monitor everything on their network and get fined if they don't report somebody. Instead it says *IF* they detect somebody looking at illegal images or something else covered in the act, and they fail to report it, then they can be fined. This means that the more monitoring an ISP does of the traffic, the more likely it is that they'll technically see something that should have been reported, and fail to do so, opening themselves up for legal problems. On the other hand, if they don't monitor and filter traffic then they won't be at risk, since they'll almost never "catch" anybody that needs to be reported under the SAFE act. Granted, the SAFE act is still a horrible idea, but it's not something that will cause ISPs to do more monitoring.
Here's a clue: "America" (people in America) did invent the Internet, a substantial part of the computer, the light bulb, the telephone ... not quite ad infinitum. America did not invent everything, not even a majority of things, but American inventors certainly did invent a huge fraction of things invented since 1776.
If you are going to throw an irrelevant troll rant, at least get your facts straight :-)
For a VPS. It's a crude/expensive workaround, but it works. It sure sucks to pay an extra $15/mo for a server that I can use to do bittorrent without being throttled, and I ssh to it to establish a proxy connection for my web browsing.
Too bad my area doesn't have non-sucky ISP like Speakeasy.
Please direct all bug reports to
Remember that company that was selling "redacted" versions of movies? I think that they were some very religious Christian group that wanted to give their members a way to watch videos with the guts and gore and swearing edited out. From what I recall, they were rather ethical about it (the copyright side of things), purchasing one new copy of every movie for each redacted one that they sold.
Now I may not agree that censoring movies like this is a good social move, but I am sympathetic to the idea. For persons who do not own the technology or have the known-how to auto-skip over parts of movies they do not want to see (blame the DMCA from banning such tools), such persons should be able to enlist someone else to do this editing (on a personal copy of the movie) as much as they damn well please (Doctrine of First-Sale, where did you go?).
Compare that kind of "filtering" with the actions of these ISPs: With "filtering" ISPs, people are enjoined from receiving original, unadulterated* content from the tubes. It is, without a doubt, more difficult for them to access the uncensored version, and in the case of embedding new content, it could be nigh impossible for the user to sieve the added bits from the original bits.
In the case of the Curse-Curtailing-Christians above (not an actual Hardy Boys title, but it should be), the end user has actively decided that they wish to choose a NEW product -- a derivative work of the original that is more to their liking -- while still respecting the original content producers and paying them the fair market price for the original content. Very importantly, while the consumer may choose the NEW product today, the original content is still available in the marketplace, if they ever wish to see what parts had been removed.
At the end of the day it comes down to the freedom to
1) Not have your communications be censored or filtered
2) Be able to modify (for personal use) any media that you have gainfully acquired
Why is this so difficult an idea? Why have we not yet addressed this issue in America?
As Pepé Le Pew might say, "Le Sigh".
* insert appropriate joke about the Internet being "Adult-e-Rated"...
coding is life
Sooner or later the ISPS will start advertising "We dont restrict your usage, unlike ". The market competition will provide us net neutrality not government intervention
Encrypt everything. Someone more knowledgeable in the area can shed more light on this, but will any of this filtering software have any discernable effect if we encrypt all communications?
My ISP (3web Canada) has taken to throwing up dnserror pages when a site cannot be found.
This seems to happen on misses on the DNS cache rather than failures to resolve to the root DNS server.
I have had the DNS error page appear for worldofwarcraft.com and slashdot.com.
The DNS error page throws up a bunch of ads. So the the failure to resolve to worldofwarcraft.com left me staring at a bunch of goldfarmer ads.
I can see lawsuits starting over this soon. The ISP has a financial incentive in failing to the DNS error page and serving the ad.
Yes
Will we see a trend towards major websites being served entirely over https?
Yeah, and I'm sick of schools that teach kids they are better than Americans! All this cultural bigotry has to stop!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Once this takes hold, you can bet news and government intelligence apparatuses will exploit this to the hilt. Propaganda, revisionist history, and deception will gradually be used more than ever to manipulate the public (of any country, internal or external).
Just look at how recently we find the current cadge/cabal in the white house has manipulated fact to bring about world disfavor upon Iran, which the UN and other agencies (even US intel agencies) now claim is not so badly outside of the line when it comes to the nukes and nuclear plants the bush administration so scathingly deride.
Capping data volume is one thing, but selective insertion or redaction of material will prove dangerous and render ever more untrustworthy any use the Internet(s) might have for anything other than frivolous entertainment.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
True, but the [expensive] infrastructure to provide the ad stripping and replacement will already be purchased and in place. It would be a huge oversite to let those resources sit idle. So, they will continue to strip and replace on any content they can get their hands on. As content moves to SSL they just don't have to keep all of the servers stripping ads and can start re-purposing some of that power. Maybe the could make them into SSL proxies! Yeah!
Whenever you see this happening, do a screen capture and a "save page" to preserve the evidence, and then notify the webmaster of the page whose copyright was infringed, suggesting that this someone is committing this felony infringement of their rights, and that they need to do something about it before the statute of limitations on such action expires.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Does Rogers lose common carrier status if they try this?
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I've really ENJOYED THE SAFETY I GET with web filtering. This sort of stuff has simply gone too NOT FAR ENOUGH. I'm so ABSOLUTELY CONTENT with Comcast, I'm going to go call them right now and VOLUNTARILY INCREASE THE AMOUNT I AM PAYING THEM, and I suggest that everybody else yell about HOW COMCASTIC THEIR SERVICE IS.
Sincerely,
SATISFIED CUSTOMER
I hope it gets worse. Soon people will begin to say "fuck it" and go play outside, or go strengthen their minds with reading or conversation.
We should send a strong and clear message that we do not want censorship of the internet by electing only politicians who support net neutrality and other anti-censorship and pro-rights measures. Dennis Kucinich is one candidate who does and who has a strong record of voting down other laws such as the Military Commissions act and the "thought crime" bill which is so loosely defined that peaceful protests could fall under its provisions.
This filtering and modifications of internet traffic is no different than what we see happening in china and else where, except corporations are doing censoring rather than the government directly. Many of these corporations have political alignments, often republican, so they could perhaps even abuse the power to manipulate political web pages. Its Really the same thing as what happens in china, the people who do it are different in name only, but they are both powerful elite establishment. The internet can be such a powerful tool of citisen empowerment that for the first time has given everyone free speech and the ability to publish and access information published by anyone else. It has decentralised information flow in a way that no single large entity can control it and thus use media channels for propogandisation purposes. The powers that be dont like this because they sense they are losing their power to meld the public mind at their wish and keep people ignorant and stupid, thus easily controlled. These corporations can easily become defacto government and through this power control what people can say, among so many other things.
If we value free speech, and the values of free expression and free thought, that has made this country great, we should soundly reject this pro censorship position. It is still censorship even if corporations which are sort of quasi governmental do it. ISPs should be considered common carriers, that is what they are, and they should be obliged just like a telephone company to carry data unmodified. They form a communications infrastructure in society, like the telephone network need to respect free speech rights.
So, if ISPs begin modifying content that they deliver to their users, what happens in terms of the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA? By doing this, will they be opening themselves up to litigation from the MPAA/RIAA, or is it unrelated?
It's a business people and bandwidth costs money. You have to assume that the evolution of the internet would follow the same basic pattern as other communication networks.
Where in the world did this belief that you are free to do whatever you want on the internet ever come from ?
If I ran an ISP I would use filtering to prevent bandwidth hogs. I mean, do you guys remember what a BBS was ? When nodes cost serious money you had lots of limitations. As the available bandwidth shrinks filtering becomes more and more cost effective.
Since America does not believe in socialism, this is the future of the internet, corporate America pushes for stiffer patent law, refuses to absorb the costs of communication upgrades and shapes bandwidth by default.
Think about it, if you wanted to run a secure ISP for profit, you'd want bandwidth shaping also.
It's a given ISP's will merege and filter as costs and user increase. We have no national communication structure, just a headless monster that will bite it's own head off as soon as cooperate for the greater good.
Am I wrong ?
Will the Torrent community start to find more efficient and effective ways of circumventing the content filtering? Something tells me yes they will. And the conflict goes on, and on and on and on.
Pleas don't be my ISP.
The ISP isn't intercepting and modifying google....they are warning their user about hitting bandwidth overage charged. There is absolutely NO evidence presented that the ISP is paying any attention to which page they prepended their info to at all. And if they didn't go out of their way to warn users that they were approaching "you have to pay extra" territory, they would be excoriated for that.
As a hypothetical example I'll take food safety. With tort law, victims could sue for contaminated food; the regulatory approach might use inspections and licensing to stop the food from being distributed in the first place.
Each approach has its advantages. Tort law is more flexible and doesn't require enforcement and regulatory bodies. But it requires lots of lawyers, and it's more uncertain: because it's not 100% clear what is permitted and what isn't until a case comes to trial, it can result in people and organizations avoiding activities that might be perfectly legal for fear that they might lose a judgment. An example of this is filmmakers, who won't risk using any derivative material without permission for fear it might fail to quality for Fair Use if sued. Regulation, on the other hand, is more predictable - everyone always knows exactly what the situation is, and it can prevent problems before they happen.
As a Canadian, my instinct is that judicious regulation would be entirely appropriate in this case.
I can already envision outfits like TimeWarner and Comcast (well, all the cable internet providers, probably) who will filter or limit access to sites like hulu.com.. That site is just the greatest thing ever for ppl who only want internet access and don't watch a lot of TV... but pay the $50/mo extra for cable just to watch those one or two shows they really love. Hulu is gonna cut into cable company's bottom line as people drop the TV service in favor of online TV content.
Go HULU!
(and no, I'm not a shill)
SSL doesn't work with virtual hosting. That means each cert essentially needs it's own IP address. Since there's already somewhat of an IP address shortage (due to inefficient provisioning in the early days of the net), it may be awhile before this actually happens.
Who knows, maybe it will be a driver, either for, or against IPv6
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
The Internet already has beer and hookers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Also as others have suggested, even if the ECPA could be waived by contract, this should violate the copyright holder's copyright. The copyright holder is not a party to any agreement between the user and ISP.
Okay so this has everyone up in a lather.. They didn't alter the content of the page, I don't think they identified a certain page and then made substitutions. If the user signs on and the first page that gets loaded gets a message added at the top regarding their account that they can opt out of.. what is the problem? Yes they COULD do all sorts of naughty stuff also, but they ALREADY could do that before. Seems like a fairly decent way to get important account messages in a way that can't get lost or missed.
What, exactly, are they going to do to kill my SSL certs?
I'd assume Firefoy would warn me before installing an unsigned update, right?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If the "type of connection" of BitTorrent is to be detected, you really have to watch the data going through. The same can be said for really anything other than reacting merely to the port number used.
That said, what Comcast is doing, if I remember, is actually based on nothing more than the total number of TCP connections. Thus, you actually can run BitTorrent just fine, so long as you limit the max number of connections to something reasonable.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Many sites on the same IP can share the same certificate.
This opens up a new marketing tool for low-cost virtual hosting providers:
"Do you want people to see your site as you intended? Use https: and automatically get our ACME SSL certificate."
Put verbage on the web site and the certificate to confirm to end-users it's legit so they don't panic.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In 1999 after my wife graduated from college, she worked at a company called NTown Technologies in Knoxville, TN. They had a device that reconstructed the web pages of ISP users, and added a banner bar to the top of each page. The bar had links to email, a search box, and... a big area for banner ads.
The company's motto was "Bringing the Web Home" and they wanted to sell these boxes to ISPs around the country. The ISP would try to use the local paper's ad sales force to sell ads for internet viewers, thereby giving the paper a little revenue stream. The ads would supposedly "work better" because they would be for local businesses instead of internet-wide companies. (Note: I think Ntown got a patent on this business model, so don't go copy it now!)
My wife worked for the Ntown dial-up ISP that they ran as a test platform. The technology worked; they had a customer base willing to have the banner in exchange for a lower monthly access cost, but I think there were problems scaling the traffic, especially with regard to non-html traffic that needed to be analyzed (or not). I assume they also had trouble finding customers. They went out of business less than a year after my wife quit.
Here's a press release that vaguely describes the technology as of 2000:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_May_23/ai_62257929
Is there money to be made?
At least in 1999-2000, the answer was no.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Life is hard, maybe you should quit now.
In a word: Yes.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Also, does their extra crap count towards your bandwidth caps?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As an ISP myself, I think this is a fine idea. It doesn't change the original content of the page, and it's a great way to get a message to a user. For those of you who are not ISPs, it's important for you to understand that at times it is actually rather tough for an ISP to send a message to a customer reliably and quickly. We've tried e-mail, but some people don't check their mail or change their addresses without notice (often because they have revealed their addresses online and have gotten spammed to death at the one we know). We've tried sending notices via the Windows Message Service (at least when the users ran Windows), but that avenue only lasted until abusers started using it for pop-up spam. We've tried calling, but that's expensive, labor intensive, and time-consuming. Sending the message via the user's browser is not unlike the messages which TV stations superimpose on other material -- and is no more a violation of copyright. But it's far less annoying, because the user can dismiss the message once it's read. (Fortunately, it is not patentable, because services like Juno have been "framing" pages for years.) And warning the user is far more friendly than having an overage charge come as a surprise on the next bill.
If I am a provider of a resource at a URI (e.g. www.google.com) I serve content in response to a request. If a third party then intercepts that response content and changes it they are creating a second copy of the response and presenting that to the client. Therefore they are breaking copyright. They are also committing fraud, by representing their copy of the response as mine.
Frankly I'm sick of non-American schools teaching their kids that "American school system that produces children who are brought up to believe that America IS the world and anything that goes on outside is irrelevant. Children so stupid they think America invented the Internet, computer, motor car, light bulb, telephone etc ad infinitum...."
:)
Why do non-Americans teach their kids that Americans believe this stuff? I'm sure anywhere you go in the world you will find ignorant self-righteous people. America does not have a lock on that class of people yet!
It seems to me that the title of this article, "Will ISP Web Content Filtering Continue To Grow?", is both inaccurate and inflammatory. The listing of the article in the cateogry "Censorship" is also misleading. Rogers is not filtering or changing the content of Web pages, nor is it censoring them. It's merely displaying a message in the user's browser window, just above the unaltered contents of the page.
Important Information about your Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet account!
No, as pointed out in my post and the hyperlink to the Wikipedia, I meant Vint Cerf et al. The Internet was actually a series of fundamental inventions, even though some children might not know that because the Internet is older than they are. More over, the story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet is false.
This is unfortunately what is bound to happen when you allow privately owned monopolies, and a weighty argument in favour of nationalisation. There are certain things that are simply too important to leave them to free market forces - health care, power generation, water supply, roads, telephone lines and now internet access. These are areas where small to middle sized companies would never really be able to compete, which leads to monopolies - which in the end will lead to abuse. Call it 'communism' if you like, but to me the important thing is not the ideology, it's whatever gives me and everybody else the best options. In the case of internet connection, if the state supplied the physical lines, we could make sure through legislation that all service providers had a level playing field and that there was real competition.
Right now it is only adverts that get filtered; well, probably. Later, who knows? The thing about private companies is that they are controlled by people who are not held accountable by a democratic process, so they are free to impress whichever political and/or religious viewpoints they want on the practises of their business - they don't have to stick to what maximises their profits, especially if they have no real competition, as in the situation where people don't have access to another ISP.
This has always been the thing we have criticised about the Soviet Union, that people were not allowed access to unfiltered, uncensored news; and that was the main reason why the leaders could hold on to power for so long. The same can easily happen in the US or enywhere else, if all the news channels are owned by huge companies that all agree on what you are not allowed to hear about, and all ISPs filter out the same subjects.
...filter my port 80 traffic to the point where I'm considering moving to another carrier. Fortunately for me, I do have a selection each with their own pretty quirks, not least of which is Virgin's £7/MB tariff (if I get that desperate to post on /.)
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Oh, Look! We're becoming more like China.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
But the real problem is that you won't know it's happening. The ISP could redirect your browser's request to *.adsence.com to an internal server that would grab the real ad, replace it with something similar and serve it to you instead of the one coming from Google. The only way you would know is if Google was serving ads over SSL, and maybe not even then if the weasel the customer into installing the software that came with the modem. This would allow them to install the ISP's cert in you browser so they could proxy SSL sessions.
Make a website.
Access it through your idiotic ISP.
Sue them for copyright infringement.
Profit.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Where do you have a server where the isp allows you to download torrents? What kind of bandwidth allowances do you have?
IANAL etc, but I believe you actually get to go for the $750/page that was modified. Since it would be different for each customer, you're looking at a new violation for each page for each customer & that is getting into real money. So, in the US Rogers would be getting a royal rogering. In Canada I'm not sure what the rules are, but I have a feeling that Rogers is probably setting itself up for just as much trouble.
Try looking at the history of ARPANET, as well as the contributions to the Ethernet protocol that came from University of Hawaii. Yes, Ethernet != Internet, but I'm pretty surethat it laid some of the important groundwork.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
America didn't for sure, since Brazilians, Mexicans and Uruguayans and other Americans haven't got an history of scientific discovery.
As for your examples, well, you are really stretching it. All the principles for the computer were put in place by French and British scientists, Graham Bell was of British origin (Scottish) and the other claimant to the invention was Italian. Then you link to Wikipedia about the light bulb that shows clearly it was a mostly British invention.
USians have clearly contributed lots to the advancement of science, but you don't need to be economical with the truth to make that point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.