To me, the bigger question is "Are ISPs common carriers?" To the best of my knowledge, the ISP businesses even of the telcos are not of common carrier status under federal law. If that is the case, my understanding of statute in question is that it does not apply and the ISPs should tell the MN government to go find a workable statute. Owen On May 4, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Ken Gilmour wrote:
So is this going to become like the great firewall of China eventually? You can see in the letters that they are "going to see how it goes and then maybe start blocking more stuff" if they are successful. I can see a big nightmare heading this way if ISPs start caving in to requests like this.
2009/5/4 John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>:
Not withstanding the legality of such an order, how would one operationally enforce that order?
The order has a list of IP addresses, so I expect the ISPs will just block those IPs in routers somewhere.
Since offshore online gambling is equally illegal everywhere in the U.S., the ISPs have little reason to limit the block to Minnesota customers, giving them a lot of latitude in where they implement the block.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex- Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.