Internet access and service providers are increasingly being coerced into...

between Internet intermediaries and their consumers in order to boost providers’ role in intellectual property rights enforcement, child safety, protection of tax revenue from online gambling and other objectives, it said. Technological and market developments since the last decade, when current intermediary liability laws such as the EU e-commerce directive’s “safe harbor” were created, have led to more legal uncertainty and better incentives for ISPs to become more involved in the data they transmit, to offer “non-neutral” Internet access, it said. Third parties such as governments and intellectual property owners now find it easier to encourage companies to police the Internet than to address the problems themselves, it said. Real self-regulation exists where service providers manage their networks to avoid spam, block attacks and viruses and comply with judicially ordered notice-and-takedown orders, but the growing move toward “cooperation” between ISPs and law enforcement bodies, non-judicial takedowns and voluntary Web-blocking and filtering amounts to devolved enforcement, EDRI said. Academic research shows the dangers of such an approach for openness and fundamental rights, but governments and regional organizations such as the EU appear to treat such delegations of law as “an unquestioned good,” it said. As a result, due process, free speech and the democratic nature of the Internet are now in grave danger, the report said. “Essentially every aspect of our online activity is subject to regulation by private companies” based on a range of public relations concerns, business priorities, threats of regulatory interventions and worries about civil and criminal liabilities, it said. Governments are voluntarily surrendering political and judicial power to an industry that’s changing rapidly, it said. This slope toward a “censorship ecosystem” is taking place with very little analysis about its long-term consequences and absent a clear democratic decision that this is genuinely in society’s best interest, it said. An urgent public debate is needed to assess the scale of the policing measures being entrusted to intermediaries and the cost to the rule of law, human rights, and effective investigation and prosecution of serious crimes in the digital environment, it said. EDRI Advocacy Coordinator and report author Joe McNamee said he will meet with EC officials and European Parliament members to “talk them through” the document. One European Commission vice president has already voiced shock at the lack of oversight, even within the EC, of the informal agreements with industry, McNamee told us.