UK Wants ISPs To Be Responsible For Third Party Content Online 158
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."
Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
All sites promoting religion are inaccurate, many government sites are inaccurate and Mr Vaizey himself makes assertions which would be widely deemed as inaccurate.
This is inaccurate, nobody with any "talent" is going to perform for a moron like Mr Vaizey. I demand this inaccurate blog posting [vaizey.com] be removed at once!
Bad title (Score:3, Insightful)
Impressive Spin (Score:5, Insightful)
. 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:Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Material deemed inaccurate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whatever happened to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It was a cute sound bite but a dumb idea then, and it's still a cute sound bite but a dumb idea now.
Protecting political speech is one thing, but I have no intention of defending to the death your "right" to tell vicious lies about someone that destroy their life just because you have time/money/media control/influence that they do not and you happen not to like them.
This is why absolute free speech is a dumb idea, which in turn is why no country actually guarantees it in law.
Re:Impressive Spin (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure they do, and they're just fine if you have more money than sense and your lawyer on speed dial. Here in the UK, however, we tend to consider formal court action a last resort, and to try to resolve things via less formal (and expensive and time-consuming) means first. Full legal actions are a significant hassle, the cost of which in time and/or money may be disproportionate to the damage caused even if the damage is real.
Re:You are correct, everyone please read article. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously folks, if we TERMINATED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE anything which even vaguely tries to be rampantly abusive of our privacy and general freedoms on the internet the world would be a better place. People would STOP AND THINK before they showed how completely deficient their thinking has become.
At some point you need to call for the ROFLCOPTER and wait for the sanity-police to come to the rescue.
Kill it before it grows, nuke it from space. Cancel his internet subscription, fire him from his portfolio, he's a complete and utter muppet and obviously has trouble tying his own shoes in the morning.
What the internet really is. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one big dumb unified end-to-end communication network. What people think of as "Internet" such things like search engines, web sites and other forms content, are services provided by machines and real people who manage them on the other end of some tenous abstract link through a math address space. The internet itself is a pipe with no walls. It has no spacial volume - no memory, anything that falters in the tubes, after a while vanishes, never reaching it's destination.
Lawmakersm, please by all means make laws to go after those who do wrong, go after the actual criminals and their equipment.
But do not attack infrastructure, it's absurd.
Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Impressive Spin (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
And how is your ISP going to do that? At best they could remove it if it's on a server on their network, otherwise you're SOL.
And in the case of the Daily Mail, what do you plan to do about all those evil people who have copies of the print version of the newspaper?
Re:You got it all wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would like to complain about Ed Vaizey's opinion about public forums. Where do I go to censor him?
Get your facts straight (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:You got it all wrong! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Where is the motivation? (Score:3, Insightful)
The current UK government is doing some very unpopular things and it is going to get worse.
Back in the eighties it was possible to largely control what the media printed and laws were put in place to prevent people gathering together.
Now it is possible to set up forums, publish idea's find like minded people and report on current events, publish photographs and video's easily and the UK government can do damn all to stop it appearing and worse for them for the British public to read it, with no "spin" from them.
Obviously if the Government can choose to block sites they can disrupt organised opposition to their policies.
http://www.fbu.org.uk/newspress/pressrelease/2010/10_29a.php [fbu.org.uk] This is from the fire brigade union, just a short piece on how striking firemen helped private contractors when they couldn't use the equipment properly, and countering some of the smear campaign against them.
Would the government choose to block sites like this if they could?
One thing i'm curious about is the lack of communication by ex MP's what do they do when they have lost their seat? Do any of them continue to work for the communities they have previously been representing?
Re:Material deemed inaccurate? (Score:3, Insightful)
If people want to blast their lies and propaganda out in all directions - I say let them - there are two sides to any story, and the other party will always have the ability to respond. In this sense, the internet is a great leveler - you don't have to be wealthy or have media influence to post out your ideas - why else do you think people like Rupert Murdoch are so terrified, and trying their best to wrest control of the current infrastructure?
Re:You got it all wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
Money.
Money will decide what is an inacurrate fact.
Re:Truth is stranger than fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Get your facts straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet Companies != ISPs
Internet Companies, in this context, are companies that operate in part or in whole on the internet.
Re:While we're at it, (Score:3, Insightful)
ISPs have long been decreasing the average intelligence online...
Years ago, you typically only had internet access if you were studying/working at a university, or a geek who knew how to configure pppd dialscripts and the like.
Re:Impressive Spin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which attacks on freedom of speech? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Or they've been to a Phish concert.
Re:You got it all wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)