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Dutch Hotels Must Register As ISPs
hankwang writes "The Dutch telecommunications authority OPTA has announced that Dutch hotels must register as internet providers (original version, in Dutch) because that is what they formally are, according to Dutch laws. It is well possible that once hotels are officially internet providers, they will also have to abide by the European regulations on data retention and make efforts to link email headers and other data traffic to individual hotel guests. Could this also happen in other European countries? This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels."
The OPTA has said that they are not sure yet if the hotels are ISP's. They are still investigating this and I think that is the reason they have send some letters out. In order to get a trial so it will become clear what an ISP is. In the Netherlands everyone who offers public access to internet or other telecomservices has to deal with the OPTA. It's also the organisation that puts fines on spamming etc. Our telecom watchhound in short.
I remember things like this whenever someone criticizes the US and suggests that I move to a free country. Netherlands has often been on that supposed list of "free countries."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I read this yesterday on nu.nl and I think it's completely ridiculous. The hotels (and my hospital I found out yesterday, and McDonalds and many many other places) can offer WiFi because they have a deal with a provider. Isn't that enough? I thought the Opta was there for the consumer but now I am not so sure anymore.
-- Cheers!
Hotels were also found to be cable TV providers, telephone service providers, cell phone service providers, water and electric utility providers, furnishing distributors, and food and beverage distributors and must meet all the requirements and responsibilities of each of those industries.
I'm amazed how little your comment resembles reality. Libertarians, and also the TEA party crowd (though they are not exactly the same) favor a smaller government all the way around. Sure, there are some who, for instance, hate recreational drug use. However, as they favor less government, they don't want the government to restrict it. On the other hand, on the left leaning side, some might not like people to have firearms, and yet they also don't want government regulation there.
The Libertairians and the TEA party voters don't agree on how to wield the mighty arm of the law, they agree that it should be weakened. They believe that instead these things should be decided on a state, or community level, but not on the national level. They certainly wouldn't push for the regulations you speak of, and controling communications is right out.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
The majority of the guests are not going to use the borrow the SMTP server that the hotel uses.
They are typically going to HTTPS to some webmail account.
Good luck getting the headers out of that.
If the hotel has a NAT-ted network, what are they supposed to log? Which 192.168.x.y address had a particular evil-doing port number at a particular time, and match that t a guest?
Europeans are going daft.
I'm amazed how little your comment resembles reality. Libertarians, and also the TEA party crowd (though they are not exactly the same) favor a smaller government all the way around. Sure, there are some who, for instance, hate recreational drug use. However, as they favor less government, they don't want the government to restrict it. On the other hand, on the left leaning side, some might not like people to have firearms, and yet they also don't want government regulation there.
The Libertairians and the TEA party voters don't agree on how to wield the mighty arm of the law, they agree that it should be weakened. They believe that instead these things should be decided on a state, or community level, but not on the national level. They certainly wouldn't push for the regulations you speak of, and controling communications is right out.
Just looking at your comment history. Quite a few gems in there.
This one about you wanting hollywood movies to have no immorality and have biblically themed messages is hilarious.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806598&cid=33775058
Now i'm not saying you in particular feel the need to push your viewpoint on others but there are plenty of Libertarians who do. They want to control the internet so that it fits their idea of morality. This has become the new meaning of Libertarianism. It's the opposite of what it should mean and it's unfortunate but the fact is Libertarianism, thanks to the religious right, is now an ideology that wants to control the lives of others. Your typical religious censorship nuts are quite representative of the Libertarian movement.
Unfortunately, while he was probably just trolling, a lot of people genuinely believe that the TEAbaggers are either small-l or big-L libertarians. It's hard to say who has the worst marketing department between the Libertarian Party, the North Koreans, and NAMBLA.
For the record, here's how you tell the difference: the L/libertarians were the ones bitching about government overreach during the last administration. The Tea Partiers are the ones who were perfectly content until a President of the Wrong Color was elected.
I happen to be typing this from a Dutch Hotel.
This particular one has free wireless, and there is no way to identify a particular system accessing the net to a room. In fact, without staying here I could still probably sit in the car park or hotel lobby and access the internet from there. There's even a PC in the lobby with anonymous access from it.
Granted it does use a "Hotspot" login page (just need to check a checkbox and click login), so I suppose that could be modified to have someone provide a room number or PIN etc...
Changing the way things work though will invariably be a pain though, especially if you need to access the Internet over the weekends and the authentication system breaks down or something else goes wrong... (as seems to be quite common with the systems in many hotels). Reception tend to look at you with rather blank faces when this happens, and it usually isn't fixed until a weekday.
Seeing as how I've actually been to TEA party rallies and support Libertarian ideas, and have not come across a single example of a libertarian push for government control of anything, I must ask you to cite your sources.
Tea Party protests FOR government intervention to stop the rebulding of a mosque at ground zero.
Brooklyn Tea Party founder John Press, who rallied against the Ground Zero Mosque in recent weeks, again raised the spectre of foreign domination. "The Mosque is founded by a very scary people and the US Constitution does not guarantee the right of a foreign nation to build a mosque in our country," he said. It's unclear if Mr. Press had merely forgotten the First Amendment, but one member of his protest group did recall the constitutional barrier on government suppression of religion -- he just chose to ignore it.
Link
Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, blogged about the 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center planned at Park Place and Broadway, calling it a monument to the 9/11 terrorists. "The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god,"
Link
Example 2: Tea Party anti-abortionists that WANT government to legislate against abortion.
Link
Example 3: Tea Party WANTS laws to differentiate Gay and Lesbians.
Montana Tea Party Leader Endorses Violence Toward Gay People
Link
In other words the Tea Party is nothing more than religious conservatives trying to control our lives. The Libertarian Party used to be run by Ron Paul who helped kick start the tea party movement. The two are clearly intrinsically linked. Libertarian has come to mean the opposite of its original definition thanks to people trying to play double-speak.
hankwang and timothy! Article title is misleading.
"Dutch Hotels Must Register As ISPs" is wrong (they do not) and should read "Dutch OPTA sues Hotels for being an ISP".
It is the OPTA that is test-trialing 10 large hotels to find out (by ruling) whether they are (or not are) ISP's.
"OPTA checks whether market parties comply with the law in order to protect consumers." - http://www.opta.nl/en/about-opta/
In what way exactly this move protects consumers i am not sure, but i reckon the OPTA wants to break down some vague holes in the law behind some ISP's might hide themselves.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Hotels also supply customers with electricity, water and often tv over cable network. They dispose of their customers trash and relay messages left for their customers. So they should have to register as power distributor, waterworks, cable network company, postal company and waste disposal contractor, right?
TEA party crowd (though they are not exactly the same) favor a smaller government all the way around. Sure, there are some who, for instance, hate recreational drug use. However, as they favor less government, they don't want the government to restrict it.
What Tea Party figurehead has come out against government restrictions on drugs? Has any speaker at any Tea Party event even brought this up?
No. The Tea Partiers are only against government restrictions on rich white christian folk.
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