Google sure isn’t wasting any time when it comes to an expansion of its ultrafast Internet service Google Fiber, but then again, neither are other ISPs — even those in rural Vermont.

Vermont telephone company VTel, for instance, is prepared to offer over 17,500 homes in the area the opportunity to subscribe to a gigabit Internet service for roughly half the price of Google Fiber in the greater Kansas City area. That works out to $35 per month for ultrafast Internet that’s about a hundred times faster than what the average ISPs currently offer across the country. The Wall Street Journal reports that about 600 homes have already signed up for the faster service.

“Google has really given us more encouragement,” VTel CEO Michel Guite told the WSJ. Google Fiber made headlines over the past few months after announcing its plans to expand into Austin, Texas, and more recently into Provo, Utah, where it will take over municipal ISP iProvo. Other big broadband Internet providers have responded to the threat of competition by offering free city Wi-Fi and promising to launch their own gigabit Internet services. Clearly, Google Fiber is causing a stir in the business of Internet service, and if VTel’s announcement is any indication, it’s for the best.

VTel was able to build out its own gigabit fiber infrastructure thanks to $94 million in grants from the federal government, which is encouraging high-speed Internet service providers to move into areas that normally wouldn’t make financial sense for the big companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and AT&T Uverse.

Guite did warn that it remains to be seen whether the company can build a sustainable business out of its Internet Fiber expansion. As we’ve seen with Provo, it’s actually pretty difficult to maintain a successful ISP. However, if things don’t work out, Google could always swoop in to bail out VTel and expand its Google Fiber service into yet another area on the cheap.

Internet speed image via Shutterstock

After all, the online TV and movie distributor has, on occasion, used up to a third of all bandwidth in North America singlehandedly. And Netflix’s 33 million customers currently stream more than a billion hours of TV and movies every single month.

The streaming media company has put out a “Netflix ISP Index,” giving you insight into which Internet service providers are the fastest.

In the U.S., that list starts with Google, which is running a high-speed fiber experiment in Kansas and boasts an average download speed of 3.35 megabits per second. Cox comes in fourth, followed closely by Verizon FIOS. But long-time incumbents AT&T, Time Warner, and ClearWire languish well in the rear:

1. Google Fiber – 3.35 Mbps
2. Cablevision – Optimum - 2.35 Mbps
3. SuddenLink - 2.19 Mbps
4. Cox - 2.12 Mbps
5. Verizon-FIOS - 2.10 Mbps
6. Charter - 2.08 Mbps
7. Comcast - 2.06 Mbps
8. Mediacom - 2.04 Mbps
9. Time Warner Cable - 2.04 Mbps
10. Bright House - 2.02 Mbps
11. AT&T U-Verse - 1.91 Mbps
12. Centurylink - 1.68 Mbps
13. Windstream - 1.61 Mbps
14. Frontier - 1.54 Mbps
15. AT&T DSL - 1.43 Mbps
16. Verizon DSL - 1.37 Mbps
17. Clearwire - 1.25 Mbps

The results are average velocity, so peak velocity can be much higher.

The ranking is useful for choosing an ISP, or negotiating with your current service provider. And, perhaps, from Netflix’ point of view, it’s also a shot across the bow of ISPs that might be tempted to “packet-shape,” or slow down traffic from media companies that don’t pay extra for higher speed.

Globally, Netflix members in Finland have the highest average speed, while Mexican Netflix subscribers have the lowest. And all ISPs in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland delivered better than a 2Mbps download speed.

You can check your results here.

photo credit: DigiDreamGrafix.com via photopin cc

The free wireless internet startup FreedomPop is targeting the likes of Comcast and Cablevision with its Hub Burst home router, which is now available for purchase.

First announced back in December, the $89 Hub Burst brings FreedomPop’s free wireless service beyond mobile devices. It comes with 1 gigabyte of free WiMax 4G, and you can also purchase additional bandwidth starting at $10 a month.

Like all of FreedomPop’s devices, there’s a big social component with the Hub Burst — you can earn additional bandwidth by referring family and friends. FreedomPop also offers a variety of special promotions that grant more bandwidth when completed.

While routers for cellular connections aren’t anything new, FreedomPop’s strategy certainly offers something new for home broadband users. For many people, it doesn’t really make sense for them to subscribe to home broadband connections, so a solution like the Burst Router could be ideal. (It sounds like the best way to get your non-techy grandma online.)

Unfortunately, since FreedomPop relies on WiMax 4G, you won’t see speeds anywhere near typical home broadband connections. The company’s next wave of devices will run on Sprint’s LTE connection, which has the potential to reach or surpass home broadband speeds.

A German court has ruled that the Internet is so essential to modern life that you ought to receive compensation if your service is interrupted.

As reported in by Reuters, the Karlsruhe Federal Court of Justice was trying a case in which a man lived sans DSL, thanks to his ISP, for two months in 2008 and 2009. The service disruption included the plaintiff’s VoIP phone service and even a fax line (hold the giggles, nerds). The judge ruled that Internet access was basic enough to his existence that the ISP should compensate him for his loss to the tune of €50 ($67) per day for the duration of the outage.

“The Internet plays a very important role today and affects the private life of an individual in very decisive ways,” court spokesperson Dietlind Weinland told reporters.

“Therefore, loss of use of the Internet is comparable to the loss of use of a car. … It is the first time the court ruled that an Internet connection is as important a commodity as having a phone.”

This little story reminds us of some words of wisdom from Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet itself and an all-around fantastic human being. In a controversial opinion piece, Cerf stated that Internet access is not in itself a human right. “Over time, we will end up valuing the wrong things,” he wrote.

In a followup interview with VentureBeat, Cerf stressed that while we all have a moral obligation as technology creators to ensure technology can be used to promote and enhance civil and human rights, he and many others are also concerned about overregulation of technologies, especially by governments.

Image credit: screen capture of Phillip J. Fry from Futurama, the original image used for the “Shut Up and Take My Money!” Internet meme

Tom Paseka works for CloudFlare, the content delivery network that handles more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined, delivering more than two billion pageviews per employee. The company knows a few things about the Internet.

What Paseka knew last night, apparently before any Google employees noticed, was that Google’s services appeared to be offline. Tracing the problem, he noticed an Indonesian Internet service provider in the path to Google — odd by any standard.

Particularly when CloudFlare is just a few miles from Google, not an ocean away.

It turns out, Paseka learned, that the Indonesian ISP Moratel was giving its users an incorrect route to Google. And because Moratel was trusted by other networks upstream, the incorrect route was propagating around the globe. As Paseka writes:

And, quickly, the bad routes spread. It is unlikely this was malicious, but rather a misconfiguration or an error evidencing some of the failings in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Trust model.

The fix was simply notifying Moratel about the issue, which Paseka did. Three minutes later, the problem was fixed and Google’s services were back online. Of course … they had never gone down. But they had been inaccessible.

You may not have noticed unless you were in Hong Kong. Paseka estimated that the entire outage affected only about 3-5 percent of the Internet population.

No word on whether Google engineers sent their CloudFlare colleagues a box of donuts or a Google hoodie in thanks.

photo credit: GustavoG via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The U.S. Congress Intelligence Committee and telecommunications vendor Cisco are agreed on one thing: Chinese networking equipment companies can’t be trusted.

Whether that’s just political posturing and jingoistic protectionism or the plain simple facts of global geopolitics depends a lot on who you believe.

According to Reuters, this morning Cisco killed a seven-year partnership with Chinese networking manufacturer ZTE after investigations reportedly showed that ZTE sold banned technology to Iran. Sending U.S.-developed technology that could allow Iran to monitor and control Internet usage violates U.S. sanctions against that country — and could put Cisco’s U.S. business in jeopardy.

According to Cisco’s financial statements, more than half of its revenue is from North and South America, and most of that will be from the U.S. Cisco had partnered with ZTE, licensing Cisco technology to the up-and-coming company in an attempt to fight larger and more dangerous competitor Huawei in emerging markets.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee released a draft report saying, in part, that both Huawei and ZTE “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence,” and therefore, U.S.-based Internet service providers and telecommunications companies should “seek other vendors” for infrastructure projects.

This is not new.

Congress has been concerned about China electronically spying on the U.S. for some time now. The concern is that, since Chinese companies either have close ties to the Chinese government or can be compelled to allow significant amounts of government access to their technology, products used in the sensitive telecom industry could contain backdoors or intentional security holes to facilitate espionage.

Very similar, of course, to what the FBI wants Facebook, Twitter, and Skype to grant it. Or to what the NSA was rumored to have built into various version of Windows.

China has been accused of industrial espionage many times, as well as of spying on activists and political dissidents, and very recently was reported to be attempting to access military systems in the White House itself (not for the first time). So it’s hard for China to wear the white cape here.

But that doesn’t stop the country from trying, and a spokesman for China called upon Congress to “set aside prejudices and respect the facts,” according to Reuters, as well as offering a veiled threat, saying the U.S. should “do more that is beneficial to Sino-American economic and trade ties, rather than the contrary.”

The story won’t end here.

But if it continues in the current path, this war of words threatens to become something more substantial, potentially involving trade sanctions on both sides.

photo credit: ukaszSie via photopin cc

Satellite television service provider Dish Network is planning to expand its business with a brand new high-speed Internet service, according to a Bloomberg report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

The new Internet service will use satellites from Dish’s sister company EchoStar that can support download speeds of up to 15 Mbps. However, Bloomberg’s sources indicate that Dish will likely offer just 5 Mbps so it can maximize the number of customers it takes on without straining the network. But even with the lower speeds, people in rural areas of the country are likely to be interested, as there isn’t a hardwired broadband cable service alternative.

It’s estimated that the new service can handle 2 million customers immediately, but more satellites would need to go into orbit to increase that number significantly. The company could eventually package its TV service along with the rumored new Internet service — much in the same way that cable providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable do. Dish already offers some satellite-based Internet service via a partnership with ViaStat, but it only covers certain portions of the country.

The report states that Dish will formally begin offering the new service to customers in late September or October.

Photo via Dave Lindblom/Flickr

Comcast is planning to offer a new ultra-fast broadband Internet speed tier in markets shared by rival service Verizon FiOS, according to Broadband Reports.

Comcast’s new broadband tier would offer customers the option of getting downstream speeds of up to 305 Mbps. The new tier would also be competitive with the recently launched FiOS Quantum service from Verizon that offers speeds of 300 Mbps downstream/ 65 Mbps upstream for $205 a month. While we don’t know the pricing (or any other details, for that matter), Broadband Reports’ sources did indicate that Comcast will deploy the new, faster Internet tier in Verizon FiOS markets soon.

With a growing number of people using streaming video services to consume media, higher Internet speeds are becoming more of a necessity.

A handful of smaller broadband service providers are already offering ultra fast Internet speeds of up to 1 Gbps, such as California’s Sonic.net, Google’s fiber initiative in Kansas City, Kan., and startup Gigabit Square. Verizon, however, is the first widespread broadband provider to offer ultra-high speeds at the residential level. With Comcast being the largest cable TV and Internet service provider in the country, it makes sense that it wants to remain competitive.

And speaking of competition, if news of Comcast’s new ultra-fast tier is true, it actually may prove beneficial for Verizon. Federal regulators are currently conducting an investigation into Verizon’s spectrum acquisition deal with big cable companies (including Comcast) to assess whether it would lead to less competition in the broadband business.

Photo via cmorran123/Flickr

In a series of so-called “copyright infringement reports,” ISPs would first inform customers they are being monitored, then follow up with notices on how to legally obtain copyrighted material and eventually notices saying that their action could result in a legal response. Each report would be added to a “copyright infringement list.” After the third report, owners of the copyrighted material infringed upon could ask a court to reveal an ISP customer’s identity to launch legal action. ISP customers could appeal the process — for 20 GBP ($31).

The bulk of the cost of the record-keeping and reporting falls on the individual ISPs. The companies may also be required to enact measures against customers who are repeat offenders, including capping their broadband speed and even suspending their account. However, those more extreme steps would require new legislation.

While the draft rules hint at what ISPs may face in combatting copyright scofflaws, the actual three-strikes portion will not go into effect until 2014, reports indicate.

The massive media conglomerate is refusing to comply with court-ordered requests to deliver the names and contact information of its customers to porn studios. The studios claim that Comcast’s clients have illegally downloaded their pornographic movies, and plan to use that information to sue the individuals for cash.

Comcast, which provides video, voice, and Internet to millions of Americans, has inspired numerous hate websites including Comcast Sucks and Comcast Sucks Balls, and routinely ranks high in the list of companies with the worst service. But with this latest stand, Comcast could actually be seen as a friend of Internet privacy.

Realistically, the reason Comcast is standing up for its customers’ privacy is probably less altruistic than practical.

For the company, dealing with the courts is a major (and costly) pain in the posterior. Hundreds of thousands of BitTorrent lawsuits, many but not all of which are from porn studios seeking damages for pirated videos, have been winding their way through the hallowed halls of American justice over the past few years.

Enough is enough, say Comcast’s lawyers.

Well, since they are lawyers, they actually said “plaintiffs should not be allowed to profit from unfair litigation tactics whereby they use the offices of the Court as an inexpensive means to gain Doe defendants’ personal information and coerce ‘settlements’ from them.”

Unscrambled, that means they don’t want foreign and domestic porn studios using Comcast as a proxy for badgering randy Americans into massive cash settlements.

Whether Comcast is doing this out of the goodness of its heart, concern for its clients, or simply because dealing with all these cases is an expensive, draining hassle hardly matters. The good news is, someone is finally stepping up to protect some level of privacy.

At least, in this case, if you’re downloading naughty videos.

A study released today by a UC Berkeley research group revealed that for some Internet users on some ISPs, using a search engine and typing in a word such as “apple” or “bloomingdales” would redirect the user to websites for Apple or Bloomingdale’s rather than to a page or search results about the keyword in question.

The Berkeley project, called Netalyzr, was created to measure DNS behavior. However, over the past few months, the Netalyzr team noticed some unexplained and unexpected redirections across at least 12 ISPs in the United States.

In a blog post on the findings, the team wrote, “The affected ISPs use services provided by a company called Paxfire to monetize certain web search requests. Paxfire’s main line of business is DNS-error traffic monetization, i.e., the practice of presenting advertisements and search results to users who mistyped a website’s address in their browser.

“In addition, some ISPs employ an optional, unadvertised Paxfire feature that redirects the entire stream of affected customers’ web search requests to Bing, Google and Yahoo via HTTP proxies operated by Paxfire.”

Following the money

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the Netalyzr team investigate the matter. As EFF senior staff technologist Peter Eckersley told VentureBeat, “They knew the general category of false DNS responses might be possible and worth checking for, while the details that emerged about Paxfire and what it was actually up to were a bit more surprising.”

“We knew that some forms of malware would change DNS results locally on a victim’s computer, so it made sense to look for such meddling,” said Vern Paxson, one of the Berkeley researchers.

The research team found that around 170 specific, brand-related keywords would trigger interference by the HTTP proxies, causing users to be redirected to affiliate marketing landing pages. “We don’t have a comprehensive list [of keywords], just a bunch of terms we tried, such as the names of popular web sites,” said Paxson. Although the team was testing only for single-word search terms, Paxson also said, “It’s possible that other searches are redirected too, but we haven’t tried that.”

Through the redirection process, the researchers wrote, “The ISPs and Paxfire presumably earn commission payments for the redirected flows.”

Some of the ISPs involved are, according to data presented by multiple organizations involved in the investigation, Cavalier, Cincinnati Bell, Cogent, DirecPC, Frontier, Fuse, Hughes, IBBS, Insight Broadband, Megapath, Paetec, RCN, Wide Open West and XO Communication. Charter and Iowa Telecom claim to have recently stopped doing DNS redirects.

While it’s likely that ISPs had at least some knowledge of at least some of the DNS redirection, if not search traffic redirection, it’s less likely that the brands themselves were involved in the scheme. “There is probably a chain of several intermediaries in these affiliate marketing programs between the brand itself and Paxfire,” said Eckersley.

“We would find it surprising that so many brandholders would agree to this sort of redirection, so we expect that they are not complicit,” said Paxson.

In other words, it’s difficult to say at the outset where the buck stops in this scheme and whose hands are in the cookie jar. What we do know is that many of the ISPs involved are claiming a lack of knowledge about the search redirects and pointing to third-party vendors as the real villains in the scenario.

A Charter representative told VentureBeat today that when search traffic redirects were occurring across that ISP, “We were not aware of it. It was a third party, and in a sit-down with the vendor, we said, ‘You need to be more careful about putting us into this mix… Charter doesn’t think this practice is acceptable.”

Steven Crosby of Frontier Communications Corportation told VentureBeat, “In terms of Frontier’s practices, we do not hijack any search traffic. We have clear business rules in our legal agreement with Paxfire that allows them to monetize URL address bar errors (e.g., ‘www.abc.cmo’ instead of ‘www.abc.com’ or typing an actual word like ‘PC’ into the address bar). Paxfire is not allowed to touch any search traffic that originates directly from toolbars or search bars.”

While the Charter rep was not able to name the exact vendor involved, Paxfire is just one of many Internet marketing companies that are using technical architectures for commercial and marketing purposes. These firms, which include companies like Barefruit and Golog, engage in murky practices such as search redirects, practices that violate our expectations of how the web should work and that rob us of any trust we might have in our ISPs.

If you use one of the affected ISPs, the EFF recommends running a Netalyzr test and installing a browser plugin such as HTTPS Everywhere to use HTTPS for all your web browsing “With HTTPS, attempts by the ISP or a company like Paxfire to alter the results would cause a certificate warning,” said Eckersley.

Google has also recommended using Google Public DNS and is beta-testing encrypted web search for users who want to better protect their search traffic.

The problem with Paxfire

“I’m not an expert on affiliate marketing programs, so I can’t comment on whether anything that Paxfire is doing might be a violation of the rules or norms of that business sector,” said Eckersley. But he did say that the marketing company “has no business” granting itself access to the keywords people are using to navigate the Internet.

“If my search engine is untrustworthy or not returning the results I was actually looking for, I can go and pick a different search engine. But if Paxfire has snuck out onto the network and secretly replaced all my choices of search engine with itself, I no longer get to go elsewhere for my searches.”

And when Paxfire’s proxies malfunction, any search attempts return an error message. “Users will often blame the search engine for that, when in fact it’s the fault of the company that’s secretly hijacking them,” said Eckersley.

In the end, said the EFF spokesman, it all comes back to net neutrality and how the lack of neutrality fundamentally degrades the reliability of the Internet. “Programmers assume that when they send data from A to B over the network it will arrive as it was sent. But if in fact the data is transformed by a series of companies that are trying to find ways to make a quick buck, things become more complicated, unpredictable, and fragile.”

The Frontier fiasco

In the ongoing quest to put a stop to deceptive Internet marketing practices, it’s hard to tell exactly where to lay the blame for search redirection and the responsibility for ending it. But Google took the issue upon itself when users were complaining about redirects.

Google’s security teams had been aware of DNS-based traffic interference from ISPs for months, at the very least. Google security engineer Damian Menscher wrote in response to user issues with Frontier back in March, “At Google, we are following this very closely, and trying to get Frontier to fix the issue. The root of the problem is that Frontier is intercepting some traffic, so when you try to use Google your search actually goes through a Frontier server first.”

At that time, entrepreneur and investor Andrew Payne noticed the redirection happening in his own searches. He wrote, “ISPs have redirected DNS queries for a while, but have mostly focused on typos and misspellings. I’ve never seen an example of an ISP actually hijacking a user’s Google search and inserting their own results, and that seems pretty egregious to me.” Menscher recommends users contact Frontier directly about the practice.

With folks like Payne making waves online, Frontier responded directly. Maggie Wilderotter, the ISP’s CEO, told Payne a story similar to the one we heard from Charter today: “that this had been done by one of their vendors in violation of Frontier’s business rules and it’s been shut down,” as Payne wrote. Around May 2011, Payne said Frontier had stopped redirecting Google search traffic, as far as he could tell.

According to the EFF, Google has repeatedly put pressure on ISPs to stop DNS-based redirects and has been at least somewhat successful. However, the EFF notes that Yahoo and Bing search engines are still particularly susceptible to redirects.

“This is why the ISPs that were proxying Google stopped in the past couple of months,” wrote Berkeley researcher Nicholas Weaver in a Slashdot thread today. “Google’s abuse-detection threw up a CAPTCHA on the queries, and then Google posted about it.”

Evidently, the combined noise from the web and pressure from the search engine were enough to put a stop to search redirection in some cases. A Google spokesperson confirmed, “We aren’t aware of any DNS providers that are currently doing this hijacking for searches intended for Google.”

Hopefully, continued pressure and the watchful eyes of the media, Berkeley researchers and advocacy groups like the EFF will help to end the practice of search redirects.

Image courtesy of Magic Glasses.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google and Verizon have denied a New York Times report, published yesterday, that claimed the companies are nearing an agreement for Google to pay Verizon to speed up internet access to its services.

The agreement, if true, would have run counter to Google’s long-standing support for network neutrality — the idea that all web traffic should be treated equally by internet service providers. Many were incensed by the news, since it was clearly out of character for Google.

While the news of the agreement is suspect, we do know that the two companies have been discussing net neutrality for some time, according to a statement earlier this week by Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured above with Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam at a press conference).

Google’s first official response came from its Public Policy Twitter account: “@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.”

A Google spokesperson later made a similar statement to the Guardian.

Verizon’s denial came from David Fish, Executive Direct of Media Relations, on its Policy Blog:

The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect.

At this point, it seems like the New York Times may have misunderstood some information it received about a potential Google and Verizon deal. Bloomberg published a similar report today, which states that the companies have reached a deal that would bar Verizon from slowing down certain web content on its FiOS fiber internet service, but would leave it free to limit traffic on mobile devices.

With so much rumor and speculation swirling about, I expect we’ll hear a lengthier response from Google on the matter soon.

To put it in perspective, a gigabit connection would be 10 times faster than the fastest connection available to many Americans — a 100 megabit connection via cable or current fiber technology.

Like many of its projects, the fiber network would allow Google to explore the possibility of a faster Internet. Specifically, the company wants to focus on next generation web applications, new ways to deploy fiber networks — and perhaps most significantly, Google will allow users to choose their own provider on the network. They call it an “open access” network.

As someone who drools at the thought of a 100 megabit internet connection, the possibility of a gigabit connection is downright orgasmic. Of course, it won’t make a big difference initially if the rest of the web is stuck at slower speeds, but it offers some killer possibilities down the line. It also finally allows home users, and organizations outside of higher education, to gain access to a network almost as fast as the near-mythical Internet 2.

Google is putting out a request for information from interested individuals and communities. The company will collect responses until March 26, and will announce target locations later in the year.

A Belgian court has ordered the third-largest Internet service provider in the country, Scarlet, to block its users from sharing copyrighted music, video and other files belonging to a Belgian group of  entertainment artists and publishers.

This is significant because so far ISPs have generally been let off the hook from filtering the content that regular users like you and me obtain over the Web. Debate, however, has heated up lately, now that such massive amounts of content are being transferred over the networks, and improved filtering technology makes it easier for ISPs to automatically monitor it. With most Internet traffic flowing through their gates, filtering by ISPs would have huge impact on the sharing of pirated content. Hundreds of millions of dollars are potentially at stake.

SABAM, a group representing the artists, is hoping the ruling will set a precedent for the entire European Union (pdf). Conflicting decisions on copyright within the E.U., however, may kill such dreams.

Under the ruling, Scarlet now has to implement “automatic” filters to block the person-to-person (P2P) sharing of files that SABAM claims are under its ownership. The technical decision was reached by a court-appointed expert who developed seven technical solutions for how Scarlet could implement the ruling. One of suggested solutions was Audible Magic, the copyrighted-file blocker behind MySpace.

Courts in the United States, meanwhile, have consistently ruled that ISPs are not responsible for actively blocking their users’ activities — even if there are copyright issues in question.

Here’s one helpful summary:

ISPs once balked at the implications of policing their networks, and sought to extend the “common carrier” defence developed for the first circuit-switched telephone networks [i.e., that they're not responsible for the content they deliver]. However, the argument was not recognized outside the United States, and could not be made when the carrier knew of the offence…ISPs had argued that the obligations were onerous and intrusive. Modern techniques such as deep packet inspection, and content filtering also make such claims hard to justify. Audio filtering can identify a song accurately from a small number of short samples, for example. In other words, identifying potentially infringing material is now easy and cheap.

Because the files in question are normally high-quality audio or video, sharing them accounts for a significant portion of the ISP traffic. American companies — AT&T for one — are also getting scared.

However, some European legal experts aren’t so sure about even the Belgian ruling. One article quoted Struan Robertson, a senior associate at Pensent Masons and
editor of internet law web site Out-law.com, saying that:

The copyright directive is not supposed to supersede the terms of an earlier E.U. directive, the E-Commerce Directive, which includes a “mere conduit” defense that shields ISPs from responsibility for what happens on their networks, said Struan Robertson, senior associate with Pinsent Masons and editor of the legal Web site Out-law.com. “These laws were designed to complement each other, but there was always a risk of a collision like this,” he said. “The copyright directive says copyright owners should be able to get a court order against intermediaries whose services are used for piracy, but it also says its provisions should not prejudice the E-Commerce Directive.”

Record companies, for example, already go through the courts to require ISPs to reveal the identities of users in question. We can expect more legal battles before the issue is decided here or overseas (except, now, for places like
Belgium).

In the meantime, for ways that Scarlet users could try to circumvent the forthcoming filters, check out this Slashdot conversation.