UK Wants ISPs To Be Responsible For Third Party Content Online

An anonymous reader writes "A key UK government minister, Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries), has ominously proposed that internet service providers should introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the Internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint. Vaizey anticipates that Internet users could use the 'service' to request that any material deemed to be 'inaccurate' (good luck with that) or privacy infringing is removed. No doubt any genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression."

Comments

You got it all wrong!

[Fluffeh]

You need to think of this from the child's point of view! We are doing this to protect THEM!

Re:You got it all wrong!

[Jurily]

Stop kidding yourself, there is nothing dangerous or offensive on the internet.

Stop kidding yourself, and show your kids some Goatse or Zippocat. That said, the "dangerous or offensive" nature does not come from the internet, and is by no means exclusive to it.

For example, when I was 6, I was told there was an invisible man in the sky who drowned all the puppies in the world (except two), and that this was a good thing.

Re:You got it all wrong!

[Spy der Mann]

You need to think of this from the child's point of view! We are doing this to protect THEM!

Scrap that. We need to protect the internet FROM them!

Re:You got it all wrong!

[alvinrod]

I'd never heard of zippocat before this, but from your description I find it way more disturbing than two girls one cup.

Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[mr_mischief]

Why would we worry about this facilitating attacks on free speech? It is one in itself. Allowing random third parties to censor speech is not free speech. Better is to allow the ISPs at their option to pull content they believe their customers posted in bad faith, which responsible ISPs did with regularity in the US before doing so made them responsible when they missed a case of it. ISPs don't want to be known for hosting BS sites, but several governments have made it easier to take all hands off user content than to enforce reasonable terms of service with meaningful thought and constraint. The US is among those, and I'd bet the UK is as well.

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Better is to allow the ISPs at their option to pull content they believe their customers posted in bad faith, which responsible ISPs did with regularity in the US before doing so made them responsible when they missed a case of it.

I'm not sure that is better at all. Either an ISP has an editorial function, or it does not. If you want to claim that you are not responsible for any content you carry, then act as a common carrier (or whatever your jurisdiction calls it) and don't actively read, alter, moderate or otherwise influence the data you carry. If you want to have the rights to scan or edit data passing through your network on an individual basis, based on the decisions of your own staff or the commercial agreements you choose to make to promote some content over other content, then you are no longer a mere conduit, and you must expect to be held accountable for the content you provide and any privacy violations that occur when you read data you shouldn't. I don't see how any middle ground in the legal position is not wide open to abuse, even if some responsible staff at some ISPs would not in fact abuse it.

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[JWW]

Personally I'm still waiting for the ISP to begin to strongly respond that this is not in their best interests.

At the minimum they will need to monitor all their customers. At the maximum the copyright barons want the ISPs to kick "infringers" off of the Internet.

When will the ISPs realize that for every person they kick off the Internet thats another person not paying them a monthly fee. If they have to dump 10% of their customers, they'll lose 10% of their revenue. This is not a good idea for the ISPs, its suicide.

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[cgenman]

I would like to complain about Ed Vaizey's opinion about public forums. Where do I go to censor him?

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[mr_mischief]

Back in the early days of commercial ISPs, when an ISP was an Internet Service Provider and not a phone company or cable company that drove the ISP specialist companies out of business, and when there weren't "safe harbor" and the DMCA, ISPs cared about the images of their respective companies and tried to do business with customers using the services legitimately.

ISPs would take down obviously scam sites when people complained not because they had to, but because they didn't want those sorts of sites on their servers or using their bandwidth. ISPs responded to complaints about email abuse. ISPs would cooperate openly with law enforcement when they wanted to stop a specific crime and would tell the officers to take a hike until they had a subpoena when their was a fishing expedition for user data.

How do I know this? I worked in the field as an employee and a consultant for a number of ISPs back when an ISP was a service provider like the name implies rather than a utility trying to charge extra for certain data.

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[Artifakt]

Why?
Take a private citizen. There are, in some places, specific requirements for specific private citizens to report certain felonies, (i.e. a schoolteacher being required to report suspected child abuse) but they don't translate to those same entities having to report all misdemeanors, traffic violations and torts. So why should the standard for ISPs be so much all or nothing.
        There are also other cases where specific knowledge limits are observed by law. Somewhat to my shame, I once participated in a program where local law enforcement dogs were trained to sniff out drugs. I personally planted drugs in various containers (i.e wrap the brick of dope in three layers of oil soaked plastic, and stick it in the middle of a half full coffee container, seal it, put it on the highest kitchen shelf, wipe down the area, then see if the dog can alert on it when the handler didn't know where I hid it either and couldn't give the dog subconsious cues.). This included attending a controlled burn and such, so if I were to testify that I smelled Cannabis, it would count as expert testimony, and that testimony could not be impeached with questions about how I happened to know for sure that what I smelled was pot, say from an opposing lawyer. Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot. I could theoretically be compelled to testify if subpoenaed, but most people can't. That pesky 'truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' bit means, in the US at least, you don't generally have a legal obligation to say what you don't know to be true, but only suspect.
          In addition, most ISPs don't employ someone who could make a determination, say, whether a person in an erotic photo was of legal age or a year or two under, or whether those nuclear bomb diagrams have anything classified in them (or would even work) or not. Most ISPs don't employ anyone who is a recognized specialist in copyright law either. Yes, it can be argued that common knowledge should cause employees to suspect a current piece of popular music or TV show is copyrighted and a violation is likely taking place, but expecting that to translate to knowing the status of 30 year old TV shows or music is another story. There's also the normal limits of age and obscurity - a typical 20 year old may have no reason to know whether Woody Herman recorded that file in the 1990's or the 1930's, and a typical 50 year old may have no idea who A Flock of Seagulls or Front 242 was, let alone whatever's popular now. If a person has no idea if the music comes from a commercial source and not a garage band sharing its own files, how can the law demand that person follow up on suspicions they may simply not have?

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[arkhan_jg]

You forget the ISP business model; promise the moon on a stick, expect to only have to deliver a small balloon.

Kicking off the 10% that actually use their 'unlimited - fair use limit applies' account means they can delay that upgrade for another couple of years, as hey, grandma using email and facebook doesn't exactly strain the uplinks the way the rapidshare and bittorrent guys do.

And being told to do so by the government because that customer was accused of copyright infringement by an upstanding and honest company like ACS:Law, means they don't get sued by their customers for breach of contract! Marvellous, eh.

No, what the ISP objects to with the 3 strikes-style laws is it means they have to do more paperwork and hire more people to deal with it. If the copyright industry was bearing the costs, not the ISP, they'd kick heavy users off first chance they got.

Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Why?
Take a private citizen

Kidnapping. Good start.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

All sites promoting religion are inaccurate, many government sites are inaccurate and Mr Vaizey himself makes assertions which would be widely deemed as inaccurate.

Didcot's Got Talent

On Saturday, I was one of four judges judging Didcot talent at the Civic Hall. Two dance groups, two guitar soloists and three bands, and the winner was the Mojo Pins, who already have a demo tape out there. I judged with whispering Bob Harris of Old Grey Whistle Test fame, and he was brilliant. All the acts were outstanding, and even more impressive was the organisation by Didcot sixth formers, as part of their Young Enterprise project. Well done to all involved.

This is inaccurate, nobody with any "talent" is going to perform for a moron like Mr Vaizey. I demand this inaccurate blog posting be removed at once!

Truth is stranger than fiction

[EdIII]

I am reminded of the world of Farenheit 451 and the plethora of Sci-Fi books and movies in which the Nazis won World War II. The free world is shackled with fascism on every level, censorship is enforced with capital punishment, and the secret police are in your head.

If truth really is stranger than fiction I can see Germany invading England again in the future to free the world of a great threat against freedom. In the end it will be like D-Day, but in reverse with a coalition of forces eating buttery croissants before leaving Normandy for the shores of England.

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[zmollusc]

Pfft! I would like to see them TRY to invade England. Our mighty fleet of a handful of obsolescent fighting ships will easily fend off the invaders for the 60 years or so necessary for us to build up our power generating capacity to allow us to make steel (once we have rebuilt the steelworks) and buy back the industrial machinery we sold off abroad that we need to build that steel into tanks and ships (once we retrain all the brighter media studies graduates so they can add up and use a lathe). And it will be simple to flatten the flimsy chipboard houses (that replaced the factories) to make space for factories (and the rail network that got torn up and thrown away).

Impressive Spin

[cappp]

I love the hyperbole online. The actual quote states that he was interested in

setting up a mediation service for consumers who have legitimate concerns that their privacy has been breached or that online information about them is inaccurate or constitutes a gross invasion of their privacy to discuss whether there is any way to remove access to that information.

. It's all there. A means by which a LEGITIMATE concern over SPECIFIC kinds of information is removed after a REGULATED PROCESS between parties. He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.

This is a good thing. Aren't we always harping on about Facebook/Google deliberatly violating our privacy? This guy is suggesting a mechanism whereby that kind of privacy violation can be limited, and everyone immediatly leaps to censorship hysteria.

Re:Impressive Spin

[cappp]

Thats the great thing about TFA - the minister never mentions ISPs. He uses the Internet Domain Name charity as an example of a funtioning mediation service, thats it. From then on it's all about the internet industry, which includes every single online business out there. TFA claims this is about ISPs but frankly he's going off the exact same lack of info' that I am, only I'm using a little basic common sense and not surrendering to the hysteria. It appears simply that TFA is trying to drum up a little drama.

Please extend this

[houghi]

Please extend this to the phone companies and the postal service.

And yes, that was sarcasm.

You can tell by the smell

[Quiet_Desperation]

Wow. 10 years or so into the 21st century, and the Earth is still covered in a uniform 100 foot layer of bullshit. It's never going to end, is it?

Re:Material deemed inaccurate?

[WitnessForTheOffense]

I may disagree with the veracity of your attribution, but I will defend to mild inconvenience your right to repeat a famous misquotation.

Voltaire didn't actually say that.

"The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#cite_ref-18

Get your facts straight

[sosaited]

From TFA

.....at least to attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies, as they would be able to do if a newspaper had inadvertently published that information.

Another minister blabbing BS about stuff he doesn't know. You Lord of morons, ISPs don't publish anything on Internet, they just provide access to what is already out there. What you are suggesting is comparable, to a micro level, to asking the postman give you each and every newspaper printed in the world that day, while first opening and reading all of them to see if they don't have anything printed in them that you deem wrong.

Government hates freedom. Its what they do.

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

The people want freedom, and the government wants control of the people. Nothing new here. Its the same old struggle.

They fear what you may reveal about them and others.

So much for "change" from the UK

[jonwil]

Didn't these guys get elected on the promise of LESS censorship and LESS civil liberties violations?
The only thing they have done so far on that score is to cancel the planned national ID card (and they only did that because it was costing so much money, not because they cared about civil liberties)

Is there ANYONE we can vote for in western countries like Australia, New Zealand, EU countries, US etc that will actually do something about giving people back the civil liberties they lost in the 10 years or so since some idiots crashed a couple of planes into some skyscrapers?
Is there ANYONE we can vote for that will do something GOOD when it comes to IP law and not just listen to the big end of town

It's not a law or even a proposal

[91degrees]

It's a debate. They're discussing the nature of internet privacy. Here's why this is a good idea; here's why it's a bad idea.

By talking openly and by being willing to say something stupid, they can avoid putting the stupid stuff in the actual legislation.