Tag archive: ISPs

The European Court of Justice has ruled (PDF) that Internet service providers cannot be required to install filtering systems designed to block downloads of illegal content, finding that such broad filtering violates the EU's E-Commerce Directive and could impede legal uses of the Internet and legitimate file transfers. The case dates back to 2004 when the Belgian company SABAM (which handles authorizing third-party rights to music)… Read More

The four largest Internet service providers in the UK will soon allow customers to block all pornography, or to purposefully choose to see the sexually explicit material, reports the Guardian. The controversial move is part of the government's attempts to cut down on Internet pornography. UK Prime Minister David Cameron will announce the new guidelines during meetings with the Mother's Union, which has launched a mission earlier… Read More

In a move supported by movie studios, record labels and the Obama administration, Internet providers have banded together to form a universal policy that imposes penalties on illegal downloads. The system allows for six strikes on an account with warning levels. The process starts with emails that require acknowledgement from the account holder. If the warnings are completely ignored, the final strikes result in decreasing Internet speed and… Read More

We have a new winner in the race to make movie fans give up on Hollywood altogether. The producers of Oscar award-winning film Hurt Locker have now sued a record-breaking 24,583 people for allegedly illegally downloading the movie over a peer-to-peer filesharing network, reports Torrent Freak. Voltage Pictures hopes to recover millions of dollars in damages from the defendants for money lost due to piracy. This lawsuit, headed by Washington,… Read More

Everyday Internet users are primarily concerned with bandwidth to their homes, offices, or whatever mobile devices they might be carrying at the moment, but a device's link is just one step in a much broader—and very complicated—inter-related set of networks that carry Internet traffic around the world. Today, that world got a little less complicated—or at least it's going to have one less name to remember.… Read More

It's no secret that tension is brewing between streaming services like Netflix and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). A couple months back, Comcast even began charging a partner of Netflix called Level 3 to use its bandwidth. Streaming services use a lot of bandwidth and ISPs don't like it. Unfortunately, the times, they are changing, and customers are demanding more and more streaming video. In a blog post yesterday, Netflix called… Read More

The inventor of the world wide web has commented on many of the biggest problems facing the web today. In an encompassing Scientific American editorial, Tim Berners-Lee, laid out a “call for continued open standards and neutrality,” and was not shy in his ridicule of Internet service providers, specific social networking sites, and governments who seek to tear the web from its open origins. The key to the continued success of the… Read More

Fact is indeed stranger than fiction. You’d scarcely credit that the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), which represents the major record labels (Sony, Warner Music, EMI, and Universal) could wield so much power. But, according to The Register,  they’re taking BT Communications Ireland and UPC Communications Ireland to court in order to have them accept a three-strikes-you’re-out policy for illegal file… Read More

Since 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 lawsuits against individuals it believes are copying and distributing music illegally via peer-to-peer filesharing services like Gnutella and BitTorrent. The RIAA intended the lawsuits to be a warning against Internet users downloading music illegally, but instead gave rise to a severe consumer backlash against the recording… Read More

After being threatened by the New York State Attorney General, both Comcast and NetZero haev agreed to block access to known sites and Usenet newsgroups disseminating child pornography. Most other major ISPs (including Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Earthlink, and AOL—had previously agreed to block access to the sites using a blacklist maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Comcast had… Read More

According to the BBC, six of Britain’s biggest ISPs have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform aimed at eliminating illegal file-sharing. The six, who will be named later today, will begin by sending letters to customers believed to be engaged in illegal file-sharing. But that’s only one step, and it’s believed that the companies have signed up to take… Read More

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have all agreed to block access to bulletin boards and websites that carry images of child sex abuse, as well as coming together to give $1 million to help remove child sex sites, according to the New York Times. The move comes as a turnaround, since previously ISPs had claimed they couldn’t be responsible for what customers did online. And it’s all down to Andrew Cuomo, New York State… Read More

According to a British study, the day of the two-tier Internet could be just around the corner. Not only will you pay for your service, but Internet Service Providers (ISPs) might start charging websites to allow faster access for customers.   The study, conducted by Jupiter Research, says that the idea might prove very tempting to ISPs, manyof which operate on thin profit margins to be competitive in the broadband marketplace. However, the… Read More

“Spamhaus said “pink contracts,” which have been around for many years in the anti-spam community, are at the root of the problem. Defined as agreements between ISPs and spammers in which the Internet host agrees to exempt the spammer from the company's normal terms of service in exchange for a hefty fee, the practice held myth status until anti-spam groups were able to prove financial relationships between ISPs and… Read More