Dutch Hotels Must Register As ISPs

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @03:00PM from the please-report-to-your-cubbyhole dept.

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."

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Retention of E-mail headers? by Kaz+Kylheku · 2010-10-12 16:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.