The End of Net Neutrality? British Telecom ordered to block access to NewzBin2 | Hacker News Reader

The End of Net Neutrality? British Telecom ordered to block access to NewzBin2

bbc.co.uk

65 pointsOoTheNigerian34 comments

The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site.

The key is the word "such". British ISPs have had the IWF-oriented child porn provisions in place for some time now. It even led to Wikipedia getting blocked in some cases a while back: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_ISPs_restrict_access_to_...

That is an opt-in list of sites to ban. My ISP, for instance, does not block those sites, and no-one has been ordered to follow the list. It's a bit different than being ordered by a judge using the new DEA legislation.

> Justice Arnold ruled that BT must use its blocking technology CleanFeed - which is currently used to prevent access to websites featuring child sexual abuse - to block Newzbin 2.

Good old slippery slope.

"... it helps to protect the innocent from highly offensive and illegal content," said a spokesman for BT."

Here we have it again, the 'Think of the children' argument[1]. This time BT throws Usenet binaries on the filth heap and uses the good old cliché to criminalize it. It always works!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Any serious file sharer in the UK wouldn't use BT if they could help it, they are known for appalling service, traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling. If you happen to be in UK, I'd recommend trying an ISP like bethere, there's no guarantee they cant be threatened with action, but they are definitely much more filesharer friendly, which is the way they've designed their service to be.

In regards to newzbin2, it's worth noting it's a TOR website. Can this actually be blocked? Here's a non-onionised link:

https://sc3njt2i2j4fvqa3.tor2web.org/

It's also worth noting that newsgroup filesharing, as backwards as the whole idea sounds, is in certain ways leaps and bounds better than bittorrent. I migrated from bittorrent, which I still occasionally use, to using a newsgroup provider called giganews. Yes it's a paid for service, but in this case the amount of value that you receive is huge.

For anyone with a spare five minutes who's interested in newsgroups, I suggest you look at what you can do with sickbeard, couch potato and a good newsgroup provider.

If you happen to be in UK, I'd recommend trying an ISP like bethere

While Be are a much better ISP, they do implement the IWF watchlist and so are technically capable of complying with a similar order, should one come along. If you really care about this then I'd recommend one of the smaller ISPs, such as AAISP, who have said that they don't (and won't!) do any filtering.

Of course if everyone starts moving to ISPs like that then it's likely that the government will try to force the issue.

No ISPs are going to be pro-illegal filesharing, including BeThere. They might roll over to pressure from media companies more or less easily, but not because they actively are in favour of illegal activities.

BeThere are, however, a great ISP in terms of speed and latency, in my experience at least - so from that point of view, anyone who downloads a lot should definitely consider them (or one of a number of other good ISPs) over BT.

BT and Talktalk both have publically supported the users' rights to torrent (as it isn't really outlawed yet, this will change instantly when torrents are banned). The shaping isn't bad, other than not torrenting in the evening I can't notice it.

I thought I lived in the UK and not China. So now I have to put up with a half baked economy, the media running the country, corrupt police force and now government tailored internet. At least in China they've got a strong economy, if the human rights record is a little sketchy. This is bad news for the internet in the UK, and anyone who thinks they will only use this powers for good is naive in the extreme.

If you lived in china, you'd have unfettered access to pirated movies/shows/etc... There is no meaningful crack down on online piracy in china. :)

This is very different from the kind of censorship that IS in china though, the content isn't being blocked for censorship reasons, but for commercial reasons.

> the content isn't being blocked for censorship reasons, but for commercial reasons.

All censorship is blocking for censorship reasons. You probably meant to say that the UK doesn't block content for political reasons.

It's funny how only people who've never lived in the Third World ever compare the UK or the US to Third World countries.

China was in the Second World.

You think china is third world? Come visit shanghai you can get your teeth fixed.

Hi there. You should probably read the HN guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Far from it, I have huge respect for China. However, coming from a supposedly developed western country I find the activity of my government weak. Thanks for the stereotype racial slur also.

You're welcome.

An organisation with charity status does this already in UK since 1996: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Internet_Watc...

>He continued: "It knows that the users of Newzbin 2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin 2."

Under this precedent it seems we can sue BT for allowing criminals to make money using premium paid phone scams. They provide the infrastructure, they know it's happening, they're even profiting (directly) from the crimes.

If this weren't MPA run then BT would actually be going down based on such a judgement.

Also I'm looking forward to suing the government for allowing drunk drivers to use their roads ...

Network neutrality ended when they started blocking child porn.

Or possibly when some of the phone companies started offering free access to Facebook, while charging for the rest of the web.

The more surprising thing is that they seem to genuinely believe they can "block" content. Sorry, the internet doesn't work like that.

Actually the judge says:

       Finally, I agree with counsel for the Studios that the order
       would be justified even if it only prevented access to Newzbin2
       by a minority of users.

Though he probably doesn't realise quite how ineffective this will be!

> The more surprising thing is that they seem to genuinely believe they can "block" content.

They can. Or do you mean that the judges think there's no way around the block? If so, do you have a reference for that?

Brilliant. They have caught on to the filesharing tech of the mid 90s. By this rate of progress, they should work out how to clamp down on bittorrent by around 2017.

They now have a method and a precedent for blocking "bad" web sites. Pirate Bay will be next.

hey man, NZBs are totally 21st century

Does this mean that BT will no longer provide NNTP access? I've always laughed at ISP's chasing pirates while giving access to the material themselves!

Newzbin isn't an NNTP provider. They just provide the .torrent equivalent of Usenet.

So yeah, they will most likely still allow access to NNTP.

I don't mind this and think the selling of this as 'The End of Net Neutrality' is OTT hyperbole.

I don't believe anyone's arguing that what NewzBin2 are doing is legal. Nor do I believe there's any doubt that it's technically possible for BT to do what they're being asked to do here by the courts. It's not like they're being asked to do a real-time per-page filter of Flickr for inappropriate content, for example. There's one site, with overwhelmingly illegal content, and they're being asked to block it.

If BT were restricting access to iPlayer or YouTube in favour of BT Vision then I agree, that would be a Net Neutrality issue. If they were being asked to do realtime filtering of user-generated content then I agree, that would be a moronic request issue. Neither of them are true though, this is a static block of overwhelmingly illegal content and I don't for one minute see why this is a problem.

It's hard to imagine a different ruling in this case. Courts respect copyright laws and in this case there is a clear infringement.

What I don't get is the involvement of BT, they are just an internet provider. Why wouldn't MPA directly sue NewzBin2 and shut them down?

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net Neutrality is about ensuring consumers have equal access to providers of content and providers of content have equal access to consumers.

It's not about allowing piracy - quoting wikipedia:

"Chris Elsworth, the main operator of Newzbin, had said repeatedly at trial that he had no knowledge of infringement occurring on the service, and that Newzbin's categories for "CAM," "screener," "telesync," "DVD,"R5 retail","Blu-ray," and "HD DVD" didn't suggest any evidence of infringement."

These guys were ripping people off and got shut down.

Net Neutrality is about making sure YouTube doesn't pay your ISP more to favor them over Vimeo. It's not about some guy stealing movies, and by associating net neutrality with piracy you hurt both net neutrality and people who make stuff (people like us).

Hadrian's firewall symbolises that profit is more important than freedom of speech. We didn't vote for this bullshit.

This is one of the few things that scares the hell out of me. On this path, we are all just one wrong piece of content/accusation away from persecution.

Call me a dreamer but what other solution is there than a completely de-centralized network ala P2P style. No backbones, no root DNS, no IP address authority. Just pure unadulterated internetworked chaos. There's got to be a way.

Worth noting (as the article doesn't, nor the first thoughts of many I heard) is that this is files stored on the website, which doesn't apply to torrents.

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