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
