This is taken from the NewMedia section:
"Al Jazeera decision cited as precedent for further Internet regulationThe CRTC’s decision to grant Al Jazeera carriage in Canada but at the same time require TV distributors to ensure no derogatory comments are broadcast on the station could serve as the legal basis for holding ISPs accountable for illegal material transmitted through their lines. Mark Goldberg, a prominent telecom and broadcast consultant, tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that he has been involved in early discussions around the formation of an industry self-regulatory body that would block access to sites hosting illegal content, with the threat that ISPs might be held liable for hate and kiddie porn crimes if they are made aware of illegal material and continue to allow subscribers to access it. Goldberg says the Al Jazeera ruling makes it clear that carriers can be held responsible for content, and hopes the principle will be applied to the interactive environment, as well."
What the hell? I support all efforts to rid the web of kiddy porn and hate-crime, but I still think it is completely unfair to try to hold ISPs responsible. It's one thing to monitor TV programming- it can be difficult, but compared to trying to censor every webpage on a single ISP....my god, I can't even imagine. Maybe my understanding of how the internet works isn't quite hitting the mark here or something....but it's fairly easy to make TV stations hold responsibility for their content. It's not as though it's going on under their noses or something. There's only 24 hours in a day after all, and some TV stations go off the air at night. That's a finite number of programming hours to be responsible for in a day. The hardest of those being anything filmed live (take, for instance, Don Cherry having to now work on a 'delay' due to his overactive enthusiasm). The internet is live. All the time. Stuff can go up and come down in a manner of hours, even minutes. When Gnutella first began it's reign, the main code or whatever was only online a few hours before it was torn down (this was in the wake of Napster's demise); but that was all it took. Tons of people downloaded it in that small amount of time. They go up, they come down. It's all in the control of the users, and what they want to use their space for. Every Average Joe just can't hook in to the TV station and broadcast what they want- there's a lot of decisions to be made in between.
So do they want the same level of control for the internet? Can only change content once a day or something? The way the net works, some pages are meant to be updated/changed multiple times a day, that's what they're for. That's what the medium is. Immediate information. Live information. That's why the internet is the internet, and TV is TV.
Is there a happy middle-ground? Maybe. Possibly. But holding the ISPs responsible for the actions of their customers just doesn't seem like the proper solution to the problems of the internet. At the very least, it doesn't seem very feasible at this point.
Ya, that rant probably sounded totally insane. But anyway.
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