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.

Comments

Rogers sucks.

[TheSpoom]

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.

Re:Rogers sucks.

[CSMatt]

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. That's not unusual. My parents' cable company (JetBroadband, small enough not to seem so much like an evil telco but just as annoying) recently started doing this on prime time channels to air their anti-piracy and anti-satellite ads. I believe that most of the time the ad covered up was an Enzyte commercial, which I'm all for not watching but their in-house ads are often times just as bad. However they also sometimes insert advertising for local businesses into the national channels, and they do let national ads for DirecTV and Dish Network through.

Hmm. What's to stop

[zonky]

The code being appended breaking websites in some browsers? People disabling javascript?

Re:Hmm. What's to stop

[HoosierPeschke]

It could be inserted as static text, preprocessed on their server side instead of a script appended to the page. That way the source would look just like Google had put it there themselves. I can't imagine that's legal, or at least I used to think that stuff wouldn't be legal.

Re:Hmm. What's to stop

[wizardforce]

If I remember correctly a few ISPs were toying with the isea of actually rewriting webpage code, not just inserting a little javascript for flavoring. That's the problem. ISPs could modify web page code that isn't easily blocked without blocking the entire page. not really much is preventing them from inserting text-ads for example into a body of text on a web page.

Um, use email or texting

[linzeal]

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.

This corresponds to what Microsoft wants to do

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:This corresponds to what Microsoft wants to do

[pjt33]

What about common carrier status? In countries for which this is relevant ISPs have indemnity for data passing through their systems which they merely transfer. However, if they're modifying a page then do they become liable for the its content as a whole, and thus vulnerable to libel etc. charges?

Re:You've Agreed To It

[Todd Knarr]

Except that Google (in this case) hasn't agreed to those Terms of Service and isn't bound by them. It'd be interesting to see the response to a statement like this from Google: "We grant an implicit license to ISPs to make unmodified copies of our pages on their cache servers and distribute them. We do not grant any license, implicit or explicit, to create derivative works by modifying our pages beyond the boundaries of fair use. We remind ISPs that making and distributing copies of a copyrighted work, or making and distributing a derivative work based on a copyrighted work, without a license from the copyright holder constitutes copyright infringement. We also remind them of the consequences if the PRO-IP Act currently under consideration in Congress passes.".

Private internet

[bonkeydcow]

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.

Re:What do you think?

[Ephemeriis]

I would love to see end to end encryption become standard. I know that it creates overhead, and as the admin of several small websites, I know the implementation can take longer, but I would still like it to become standard.

Agreed. I don't want anyone messing with my websites. If I load up Slashdot, I want to see what Slashdot published on their site. I don't want any additional banners/ads/whatever...I don't want text selectively changed... I want to see Slashdot. And when I publish a website I want to know that visitors are seeing what I published, not what their ISP thinks they should see.

The only way that ISPs could then exert control would be through messing with DNS records and redirects, which has far larger implementations. OpenDNS anyone?

Our regional cable ISP started manipulating DNS not too long ago, so we started switching people over to OpenDNS. But lately they've started playing with SMTP. You have to use the ISP's SMTP server unless you're a "business" customer...and of course their SMTP server will only relay for their own mail addresses. So we've had a lot of angry home users who can't use their email accounts. Hooray for webmail!

Re:The moment after this becomes fairly common.

[SiriusStarr]

I doubt this will stop ISPs for long. They'll likely just man-in-the-middle attack it. This has long been a weakness of public-key encryption and the reason that certificate authorities like Verisign were created to validate keys. The problem lies in the fact that ISPs control your communication with certificate authorities too. Theoretically, they can fool you into thinking whatever they want. How can you verify keys when all of your communications run through a single authority? Perhaps the only weakness ISPs face here (other than the wrath of consumers) is the computational demands of DPI. It will take an awful lot of computing power on their end to truly implement this. One possible way around might be through the use of multiple, distinct internet connections. If you are presented with a different key for google on two different connections, at least one of them must be faked. Of course, you are still left wondering which one, so you'd have to throw out both. I honestly think that the best hope for preventing the Orwellian state of communications that is rapidly approaching is through market pressure. So long as one ISP remains that does not filter, that remains neutral, customers will flock to them. It will be the new selling point of the 21st century, "We only censor your web a little bit!"

ECPA violation?

[anwyn]

Will someone please explain to me why content modification is not a violation of the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Clearly to modify content, you first have to intercept it.

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.

It does and it doesn't

[davidwr]

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.

https - ssl

[Nom du Keyboard]

How about if connections are just switched over to https / ssl encryption technologies. Can you prepend to an encrypted page? How long before there's a FF plug-in to strip any non-encrypted element from a page? That kind of idea could stop this nonsense pretty quick.

Also, does their extra crap count towards your bandwidth caps?