Role of ISPs

According to the Dutch digital rights organisation, Bits of Freedom, the Netherlands has just passed a new Network Neutrality law. Their unofficial translation into English suggests that Public Electronic Communications Service Providers will only be permitted to throttle or block traffic on their networks if this is necessary:

A bot is a program, maliciously installed on a computer, that allows that computer and thousands of others to be controlled by attackers. Bots are one of the major problems on the Internet, involved in many spam campaigns and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as allowing attackers to read private information from the computer’s disk and keyboard. Some bots even allow cameras and microphones to be monitored by the attacker. Detecting and removing bots is therefore in the interests of both individuals and internet providers.

I had an interesting discussion last week with Thorsten Kraft of the German ISP association, eco, on how German network providers cooperate to help reduce the number of their users' PCs that are infected with malware. The UK Government has recently added this as an aim in our national Cyber Security Strategy so the German example may be particularly relevant.

The European Court of Justice has set some limits for the sorts of measures that ISPs can be compelled to implement to discourage copyright breach by their networks. Back in 2004 the Belgian rightsholder representative SABAM sought a court order requiring an ISP, Scarlet, to install devices on its network that inspected the content of peer-to-peer communications and blocked any that appeared to contain copyright music.