Telecom Trends

Red Herring has another article that looks at the issue of a Brazilian court trying to give effect to its order to block access of a video of Daniela Cicarelli engaged in less than model behaviour on a beach.

Judge Enio Santarelli Zuliani asked ISPs in Brazil to unblock YouTube and tell him why they couldn’t just ban the video in question without denying access to the entire site. The ISPs replied that they don’t have that technology in place. The only way to stop access to the video, was to block YouTube.

The article quotes John Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor and executive director of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society:

Internet service providers are increasingly the enforcers of Internet laws. The broad trend of Internet regulation is toward a blurring of the public and the private. In order to get the enforcement done, states need the help of private intermediaries.

Would the Brazilian ISPs be more aggressive in deploying targetted blocking technology if the video in question was of another type - perhaps child exploitation? Would the blocking be able to be sufficiently refined if the Brazilian ISPs had already implemented Cleanfeed technology?

The 2007 Canadian Telecom Summit in June includes a session examining Canadian perspectives on what should be done about various forms of Illegal Content on the Internet.

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Brazil, Daniela Cicarelli, YouTube, illegal content, Canadian Telecom Summit