[AusNOG] Happy new year / New rules for age-restricted internet and mobile content after the 20th of january 2008

[Marco Huggenberger]

Dear AusNOGers!

I wish you all a happy new year and may your private and business
wishes/goals come true in 2008 ;)

On the popular german IT news website Heise [1] I just followed a news
posting regarding new rules for age-restricted internet and mobile
content [2] which are in place after the 20th of january this year.

I'm just wondering what the position of AusNOG members is since we
have some similar issues with internet regulations also here over in
switzerland?! And if you're willing to filter, are you able to filter
all your customer traffic (we don't have a layer 7 firewall for our 10
gigabit-ethernet backbone)?

On the 2nd of may 2003 a judge in lausanne (french speaking part of
switzerland) decided to send us a mandate to "filter" some internet
domains via blocking some domains manually by manipulating the DNS
Servers of each swiss ISP with a blank redirect or an information page
[4], like my company did.
After intervention of SwiNOG and the appeal from most ISPs which
received this mandate we have been authorized to remove this "useless"
DNS filtering mechanism.

Then, mid december 2007, this happens again to some swiss ISPs which
should again block some domains on their DNS infrastructure against
some law issues. Looks like they've learned nothing and the "game"
continues. On the other hand, we didn't receive the last mandate
recently, maybe they've just select ISPs randomly ;)

I think it's not the job of Network Operators Group to protect each
individual ISP from such regulation but it shows that the joined
forces and exchange about this topic could help resisting "some"
missunderstandings of justice to wallpaper or tap the internet with
some wired tactics to pass on the responsibility to the ISPs.

Would be great to hear some other point of views...

Cheers

Marco

[1] sorry, german only: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/101164
[2] http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310907
[3] sorry, french only:
http://www.nrg4u.com/abuse/canton-de-vaud-tribunal-daccusation.pdf
[4] sorry, german only: http://vaud.init7.net/