I'm not a lawyer either, but I know how ISPs are regulated in the US. The actual framework is the FCC's "Internet Policy Statement," to wit: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf . To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice. . To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement. . To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.13 . To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.14 All of this is subject to a "reasonable network management" exception. There is some disagreement about what consitututes "reasonable network management" at the fringes, but the FCC is on record that spam killing and DDOS attack mitigation are "reasonable." Some people want to add a fifth "non-discrimination" rule. In the case of the ISPs and carriers who blocked access to 4chan for a while Sunday, since that was done in accordance with DDOS mitigation, there's not any issue as far as the FCC is concerned, but that hasn't prevented the usual parties from complaining about censorship, etc. Richard Bennett -----Original Message----- From: Patrick W. Gilmore [mailto:patrick@ianai.net] Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 8:35 AM To: nanog - n. am. network ops group list Subject: Re: AT&T. Layer 6-8 needed. On Jul 27, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Hiers, David wrote:
I"m not a lawyer, but I think that the argument goes something like this...
The common carriers want to be indemnified from the content they carry. In other words, the phone company doesn't want to be held liable for the Evil Plot planned over their phone lines. The price they pay for indemnification is that they must not care about ANY content (including content that competes with content offered by a non-carrier division of the common carrier). If they edit SOME content, then they are acting in the role of a newspaper editor, and have assumed the mantle of responsibility for ALL content.
Famous two cases, Prodigy & Compuserve. Overturned many years ago. If you edit "some" content you are not automatically liable for all content. No ISP is a common carrier. That implies things like "you must provide service to everyone". Some common carriers get orders like "you must provide service in $MIDDLE_OF_NOWHERE". ISPs can, under certain circumstances, get a "mere conduit" style immunity.
Carriers can, however, do what they need to do to keep their networks running, so they are permitted disrupt traffic that is damaging to the network.
The seedy side of all of this is that if a common carrier wants to block a particular set of content from a site/network, all they need to do is point out some technical badness that comes from the same general direction. Since the background radiation of technical badness is fairly high from every direction, it's not too hard to find a good excuse when you want one.
That, I believe, is much harder. But IANAL. Hell, I Am Not An ISP even. :) -- TTFN, patrick