[AusNOG] Internet companies forced to block The Pirate Bay, bittorrent websites in Australia, Federal Court rules

[Mark Newton]

On 20 Dec 2016, at 1:18 PM, Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The ASIC case was interesting because the ISPs begged ASIC not to do this, but in that instance, the decision was ASIC's, and the ISPs had no choice.

The ISPs actually did have a choice, and were under no obligation to provide ASIC with the assistance they requested. 

Which is one reason why only some ISPs accidentally blocked hundreds of thousands of websites.

In particular, every ISP could have invoked section 314(3)(b), but most didn’t.

Additionally, sections 313(3) and (4) only require that carriers or carriage service providers “give such help as is reasonably necessary”. It’s a stretch to say that collateral blocking of a quarter of a million websites is “reasonably necessary.”

In retrospect, it wasn’t; as the various inquiries into the matter concluded. The service providers who listened to ASIC and said, “Yep, sounds reasonable, we’d better do it…” no doubt believed they were doing the right thing, but they were objectively wrong, and should have pushed back, as the law permitted (required) them to do. There are lessons there which almost certainly have not been learned.

Various ISPs came out of that episode looking like a bunch of dickheads. To portray the result as inevitable because they “had no choice” is a pretty stupid rewriting of history, and a misunderstanding of the legislation that governs the industry that you choose to earn your living from.

These laws MEAN something. The Parliament intended that ISPs would be able to kybosh unreasonable demands from law enforcement agencies: That’s what the legislation actually says. To behave as if those words were never enacted into law and ISPs have to do what they’re bloody-well told renders the Parliament’s legislated intent meaningless, and is obviously bullshit.


  - mark


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20161220/fb979bc7/attachment.html>