Role of ISPs

Questions about my last posting on Nominet's DNS domain suspension discussions, have got me thinking a bit more about my idea of "domains registered for a criminal purpose". My suggestion is that these should be the only domains that a top-level registry can remove on its own, rather than asking for the decision to be taken by an independent authority.

I'm pleased to report that the Internet Society has published a discussion paper looking at different methods being proposed around the world to respond to the use of the Internet to breach Intellectual Property Rights. For each of the approaches - graduated response and suspension of access,  traffic shaping, blocking, content identification and filtering, and DNS manipulation - the paper looks at the implications for the Internet, Internet technologies, access and use.

The Advocate General to the European Court has published his recommendation for the Court's response to questions raised in the long-running Belgian case of SABAM v Scarlet. In 2007 the Belgian court ordered the ISP Scarlet, at the request of the copyright enforcement society SABAM, to implement specific Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) systems to detect and prevent its users from exchanging copyrighted material on peer-to-peer networks.

I had a meeting with Ofcom this morning as part of their review of section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010. That section, if enabled by the Secretary of State, would allow courts to order a service provider “to prevent its service being used to gain access to [an Internet] location”.