koodo
May 2008
Senior Member
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Another episode in the stirring saga of Ma Bell:
“Bell Canada opens online video store as P2P debate rages on
By Nate Anderson | Published: May 22, 2008 - 12:19PM CT
P2P competition?
Sometimes I get the itch to work in PR. No, it doesn't happen much, but once in a while I see the sort of inexplicable corporate decision that makes me long to have been in the room when it was being discussed. Case in point: yesterday's announcement from Bell Canada that the telecom behemoth was officially launching its downloadable video store... just as Bell is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. It's hard to imagine a time at which touting your own downloadable video store makes less sense than when you're on the hot seat for throttling all P2P traffic, much of which competes with Bell to offer video (including entirely legal BitTorrent downloads from the CBC). Yes, you could look worse as a company, but puppies and shotguns would probably need to be involved”.
Full story at: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...-rages-on.html.
Related issues are flaring up nicely in the U. S. as well. Link to full story doesn’t work at the moment but this excerp sums up most matters of import.
“Former Prosecutor: ISP Content Filtering Might be a 'Five Year Felony'
by Tom Brokaw on Fri May 23, 2008 12:18 am
Story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/20...ontent-f-1.html
"Charter's proposed test of a system that eavesdrops on the URLs its customers visit, in order to serve them targeted ads, has already spurred a powerful Congressman to question whether the scheme would violate the Cable Act. For its part, Comcast's heavy-handed throttling of peer-to-peer sharing by sending fake stop messages to its customers has the Federal Communications Commission holding hand-wringing public hearings over whether it should ban the practice as being inconsistent with its open network principles.
But Ohm thinks the legal quandary is simpler. These schemes all seem to violate the Wiretap Act, a federal statute banning eavesdropping that comes with criminal and civil penalties. That law has some exceptions for service providers to monitor content, but only when necessary to deliver service, or to protect the company's "rights and property."
In fact, Ohm thinks network system administrators could themselves be in legal trouble, just for following orders from their bosses to install monitoring devices.
"Not only is this a five-year felony, it also has individual accountability," Ohm said. "The sys admin could be sued individually and prosecuted individually If you are asked by your manager to go and do this kind of monitoring, you yourself may be legally exposed”.
Story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/20...ntent-f-1.html.
All this said it puzzles me that some who have commented view traffic shaping in the UK as something that happens so we do workarounds. Surely there must be a major outcry somewhere. The stakes are too high for it not to be so.
Last edited by koodo on 05-23-2008 at 05:04 PM
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05-21-2008 05:09 PM
