Tag Archives: ISPs
EU: Judicial Review Central to Telecom Disconnects
I’m perhaps a bit idealistic, but I think that there are clear contemporary demonstrations of democracy ‘working’. Today’s example comes to us from Europe, where the European Parliament has voted to restore a graduated response to copyright infringement that would see individuals disconnected from the Internet. Disconnecting individuals from the ‘net, given its important role in citizens’ daily lives, can only be done with judicial oversight; copyright holders and ISPs alone cannot conspire to remove file sharers. This suggests that any three-strike policy in the EU will require judicial oversight, and threatens to radically reform how the copyright industry can influence ISPs. Continue reading
Privacy Advocates and Deep Packet Inspection: Vendors, ISPs, and Third-Parties
DPI vendors are routinely involved in trying to sell their product – it’s what they do – but I think what is most telling isn’t what vendors say, but what the ISPs’ representatives say. When I talked to a Bell representative recently, and asked whether it mattered to Bell that throttling BitTorrent might affect the dissemination of information, the rep’s response was “they choose that business model, and now they get to live with the consequences of choosing it” (paraphrased). Is the technology itself inherently ‘bad’? I’m not comfortable with that. Are particular uses of the technology ‘bad’? Undoubtably. Continue reading
Deep Packet Inspection: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In this post, I want to try to lay out where I see some of the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) discussions. This is to clarify things in my head that I’ve been thinking through for the past couple of days and to lay out for readers some of the ‘bigger picture’ elements of the DPI discussion (as I read them). If you’ve been fervently following developments surrounding this technology, then a lot of what is below is just rehashing what you know – hopefully the summary is useful – but if you’re relatively unfamiliar with what’s been going on this might help to orient what’s been, and is being, said. Continue reading
Three-Strikes to Banish Europeans and Americans from the ‘net?
America: this problem is now officially on your shores, and while neither AT&T or Comcast are admitting to having cut people off from the telco networks because of a three-strikes rule, it has been noted that this is likely only because three notices haven’t been sent to any one household. … To group (b), I would want to maintain there there is real symbolic value in the parliament denouncing a three-strikes rule, though I would tend to agree that if this issue is placed on the third pillar that the parliament (as I understand it) will be relatively impotent. … Three-strikes laws are the tip of a particularly nasty iceberg that we’ve been cruising towards for the past few years, and like the one that ‘met’ the Titanic, we won’t realize the magnitude of the catastrophe unless we get serious about copyright and IP law before it’s too late. Continue reading
