Re: AT&T. Layer 6-8 needed.

["Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>]

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