In this topic, Andreas and Roger you are asking who should pay to implement these measures...
I'm sad to tell you that YOU probably will have to pay for that. Despite your hope, I am pretty sure that (if a law making that appliable does exist) nobody except you (and at the end your customers if you increase your service price) will pay for such a blocking system. Even if it can seem unfair, in fact it works like that:
- Some cantons voted for banning smoke in public places (restaurants, bars, ...) except in one dedicated and closed aread (called "fumoir" in French). The restaurant managers will pay for the needed changes to become compliant. They will not receive money from the authorities to do so.
- In our work activity, we also have legal requirements. As ISPs we have the obligation to keep historical data about IP address allocation for our customers, we have to keep some records about e-mail that are sent from our mail exchange relays, ... Once again, the ISPs financed these modifications / changes / upgrades to comply the law.
This is the way it works in Switzerland: Politicians (and/or citizens when a subject is voted by them) decide the laws. Other key players assume the financial charge for it. I am not saying this is a bad idea (I agree with this way to do! (*)), however I consider that the investments should be reasonable and they should have proved their effectiveness. In the present case, this is the main problem: blocking the access to some web content (in addition to the problem of censorship I already expressed in previous posts) is not effective: 1) the simple use of a relay/proxy/anonymizer would permit to defeat this "protection"; 2) if ISPs are concerned with this measure, enterprise would not be permitting to access the offending content from an office workplace!
(*) I mentionned above I agree with the way consisting of political deputies (or citizens) making a decision, and involved actors to finance the required changes. Let me explain why. I still believe we are living in a very democratical country where individuals and companies have their own responsabilities and obligations. Everybody must take the needed measures to comply with the law without expecting any compensation. IMHO this has the advantage to make everybody playing an active role in the final decision about a law. Most of the laws follow a consult phase ("phase de consultation" in French); other laws are voted by the citizens. If you're not happy with a project law, you can inform (lobbying with the deputies / advertise the citizens) the decision makers about the problems you will face (inadequate price / effectiveness ratio for instance) but at the same time also announce that this correspond to a form of censorship. At the end, you don't make the decision and you can win or lose. But democracy is more or less respected.
If the Authorities would have to finance such a decision (such as the hardware + implementation of a censorship solution), your role would be lowered much more. Your voice would count for peanuts. That Authorities would tell you: Shut up, we decide, we pay, your financial and ethical opinions do not matter.
Once again, my questions about the present topic are:
- Is there an existing law permitting to mandate ISPs to block access to a given content? If yes, who can decide of such blocking (a canton court or a Swiss court)?
- Why was this decision to block access from the ISP taken, instead of making the hosting provider removing the offending content? The first solution is technically known to be uneffective as workarounds exist and can be used by people with only a little technical knowledge or by users having a web access from an enterprise.
- Ethically, I consider this way to proceed as a form of censorship: blocking access to a published content match my definition of censorship ("we decide what is good for you" or "we filter for your well-being", take care you prove G. Orwell right). Removing (and not simply restricting access) an offending content is a legal decision that can (and must) be taken, if that content is considered as illegal. This does not shoke me. Even if the result (for the Swiss web users) is the more or less same (it will not have access to that content), the taken action is totally different. In one case, this is filtering for some world citizens, in the second case, this is global removal of the content. An analogy can be made with publishing world: If a book containing offending someone (physical or moral person) content is written, the courts can decide to forbid the publisher to destroy all the books (and possibly if this is too late, to forbid the bookstores to sell it and to return the remaining ones to the publisher). But never the court will say the bookstores to use a black marker to strike through the offending lines or to tear out the offending pages.
Last remark: Definition of offending content is out of scope of this e-mail. Just understand that for me an offending content is something that is against the law (for instance: pedophilia content, libellous texts, ...).