Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04103.html --- From: "Trevor" <devnullat_private> To: <declanat_private> Subject: Re: Canada considers licensing Internet service providers Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 15:23:48 -0500 Declan, Just so you know, a "private members bill" means that the bill does not have the support of the government. The NDP is has only about a dozen seats in the House of Commons (out of 303). Private members bills are essentially like snowballs in hell, no chance of survival. It's generally a way for a MP that no one has ever heard of to get in the local newspapers in their riding (district). The CRTC ruled quite definatively a few years ago that ISP do not fall under their jurisdiction, and that they were not interested in changing that and had no interest in imposing themselves on anything related to the Internet. In other words, there is no one of influence considering licensing the net. Trevor --- From: "Brian K. Yoder" <byoderat_private> To: <declanat_private> Subject: RE: Canada considers licensing Internet service providers Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 17:34:09 -0800 I was an architect at EarthLink for five years and we had to deal with these issues all the time. I have a couple of reactions to this bill even though it is Canadian. First, the reason ISPs can't do anything about kiddy porn (at least in the US) is that if ISPs do any scrutiny of content at all then they become liable for any harm caused by anything less than perfect control. I would very much have liked to remove the kiddy porn sites we hosted and the kiddy porn USENET groups, after all they aren't so hard to find, but if we had done that but missed just one picture somewhere then we could have been sued by anyone claiming to have been harmed by it (and for anything else naughty that went on under our auspices). As I see it kiddy porn is different from most other kinds of "naughty" content in that producing it is rightly a crime and one that necessarily hurts people too (unlike conventional porn etc.) and rightly deserves some censorship unlike the rest. Anyway. when it comes to government calls for censorship we were always 100% consistent in refusing to go along. You may recall that we were the first to make a splash about refusing to install Carnivore boxes in our data centers. We were always quite steadfast about refusing to compromise our customer's privacy, but the kiddy porn issue is something that could have easily been dealt with if some laws would have been changed allowing us to do what we would have preferred to do anyway. Licensing ISPs should be looked at just as if they were licensing the possession of ink and paper...the first step toward censorship. --Brian --- Brian Yoder --- byoderat_private --- Cell Phone: 626-255-3338 Pager: byodermobileat_private --- Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 22:36:58 -0500 (EST) From: mskalaat_private I've set up a new page on my Web site to track all the material I can find on ISP licensing in Canada, including my own thoughts and the articles written by other participants of this mailing list: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/isp-licensing.html I've also posted in my Web log another item analysing specific points in the Bill: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lw/?id=2002102702 points discussed in that posting: 5.(1)(b) and (c), which may be "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Charter 5.(5), which I've finally managed to parse, and which makes almost everybody guilty 6.(3), which indirectly requires ISPs to destroy evidence that could otherwise convict their users -- Matthew Skala mskalaat_private Embrace and defend. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Oct 28 2002 - 07:22:46 PST