If they don’t fight for their right to exist, independent ISPs soon will be replaced by huge cable television and telephone companies supported by misguided FCC regulations, according to Kushnick, who addressed an audience Friday at ISPCON, an annual gathering for Internet service providers.
Extinction is not the only trouble bedeviling ISPs. Owners and workers say they are being forced to turn into Net nannies, cops and snoops by the cavalcade of anti-terrorist and copyright-protection legislation that’s been passed in the last two years.
Kushnick’s speech was greeted with much somber head-nodding and occasional bursts of approving applause from an audience consisting mostly of ISP owners and employees.
“ISPs could soon become a distant memory,” Kushnick warned. “It is now time for you to make sure that these regulators and the public know the contribution ISPs have made in bringing the Internet and World Wide Web to the American public so that you can continue to deliver the services and expertise that the monopolies, who want to take over your business, do not offer and have never delivered.”
The mood at ISPCON darkened late Thursday as news spread that Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had struck down a constitutional challenge by ISP Verizon Communications and ruled that the Recording Industry Association of America can subpoena ISPs for information on their file-swapping customers.
Earlier in the day, Chris Hoofnagle from the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., had warned attendees that “if the Verizon case goes the wrong way, ISPs should expect to receive unlimited requests for information on their clients.”
Over the past year, ISPs have been pummeled with demands from the RIAA and big media companies insisting that service be cut to customers who are engaging in peer-to-peer file swapping of media protected by copyrights, Hoofnagle said, during a panel discussion on “New And Electrifying Legal Developments for the Service Provider.”
During the discussion, half a dozen owners and employees of ISPs said that in more than a few cases the copyright owners had accused seemingly innocent clients of large-scale file swapping.
In one case, a 72-year-old female client of Wisconsin ISP Power Web Connect had been accused of piracy by Warner Bros., whose attorneys claimed the woman was making copies of Warner Bros. movies available to file-trading services.
“Believe me, this woman didn’t know anything about P2P and I’d bet she wouldn’t know how to use a file-sharing network even if she wanted to,” said a Power Web worker. “Yet we still get letters from Warner Bros. attorneys demanding we throw her off the network.”
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