I would be happy just to see ISPs live up to their own published AUP. The Internet would be a MUCH nicer place if this were the case. Why does the topic of AUP enforcement gravitate towards straw man discussions of totalitarian governments? Yeah, I am sure the North Korean ISP scene is no fun. But this is North America. If a company wines about the fact that they dont have a business plan that allows for the enforcement of their published rules ("oh, it just costs too much money"), they should not BS the public that they have such rules in the first place. If we want our industry to be self policing, and not policed by the public sector, we better start policing ourselves. ---Mike At 02:47 PM 29/09/2003, Sean Donelan wrote:
Continuing the trend of holding ISPs morally responsible for all things, India's Computer Emergency Response Team ordered all ISPs in India to block a Yahoo bulletin board for "promoting anti-national news and containing material against the government."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60628,00.html
ISPs are not very good at fine grain control. In India the ISPs initially blocked access to all Yahoo discussion group servers. But I'm sure they will improve monitoring of the actions of their subscribers, to adapt the blocks. What's interesting is in order to block less, the ISPs will have to invade the privacy of their users' traffic more.
Making the ISP the personal firewall for every user or country is an growing concept. Talk about cost shifting. Some countries are willing to pay for it (e.g. China), increasing the costs. The Internet may end up costing more than private point-to-point lines after ISPs install all the firewalls to implement all the personal controls desired by governments.