Feb 20, 2004 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 February 20, 2004 - It almost seems sometimes that Web hosting companies aren't always aware of how close they may be to legal difficulties. It is just by the nature of the hosting business, after all, that Web hosting companies can find themselves held legally accountable for providing services to questionable projects with which they had no direct involvement, and of which they often had no knowledge.
This week's news, in particular, served as an example of how close most Web hosting companies may unknowingly be to finding themselves involved in a large-scale legal matter.
Perhaps the best example was Monday's report that Web hosting firm Foonet/CIT had been shut down suddenly by the FBI, which sought information hosted on the company's network. The raid had reportedly brought all of the company's customers offline. A notice to customers posted at the company's site said the data center was shut down February 14 at about 8:35 am, when the FBI determined that it would be more efficient to remove the equipment from the company's site and transport it to FBI laboratories for inspection. The notice said equipment would be returned when the FBI's inspection was complete.
Also on Monday, it was reported that a lawsuit filed by Web hosting firm C I Host against ISP Everyones Internet had been dismissed in a federal court, with C I Host ordered to pay costs. C I Host CEO Chris Faulkner filed the suit last year after allegedly derogatory information about C I Host was posted on the Everyones Internet forum. The suit targeted Everyone's Internet as the owner of the forum that held the offending message thread, which has since been removed. While C I Host was ordered to pay costs, it had not yet been determined which costs, and how much.
The matter was picked up again in the forums, where Everyones Internet said, in a post to its own forum, that it had scored a win for online forums with its victory. Everyones Internet CEO Robert Marsh told theWHIR that the case signified that the rights of free speech would be upheld. His company, he said, has a deep-rooted belief that individuals have a right to say what they want to say.
On Tuesday, it was reported that Redbus founder Cliff Stanford had been charged by the UK's National High-Tech Crime Unit with illegally intercepting the emails of Redbus chairman John Porter. Standford is accused of intercepting emails to Porter from his mother, Tesco heiress and former politician Dame Shirley Porter, who was involved in a scandal in the 1980s for which she was ordered to pay £37m, but insisted she didn't have the money. It has reportedly been suggested that in the intercepted emails, Dame Porter referred to millions of pounds being available to her son. Stanford, who has been under investigation since he resigned from Redbus last year, has denied the charges.
And on Thursday, two Canadian ISPs announced that if they were asked, they would refuse to hand over customer contact information to the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), which has begun a campaign against online song swappers similar to the one launched last year by the Recording Industry Association of America. Saskatchewan-based SaskTel and Access Communications said they were not themselves involved in legal battles but assured media that they would not give in to pressure from the CRIA, saying that handing over such information would violate customer privacy policies as well as federal privacy legislation.
One matter that may not see ISPs held responsible is spam. On Thursday, a US company was handed down a fine of £75,000 after a UK watchdog organization received 900 complaints about the company sending pornographic spam that launched a premium rate dialer. The UK's Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS) received the complaints about BW Telecom from Web users who believed they had been tricked into launching the dialer.
However, in his Thursday column Open Proxies Threaten Internet, theWHIR's Rawlson O'Neil King points out that ISPs frequently contribute to the enabling of spam by operating open proxies, which have become a legitimate threat to the Internet through their increasing use in the transmission of unwanted emails. Open proxies, configured to relay data anonymously and mask originating Internet addresses, are used by thousands of spammers to "bounce" email through the servers of other organizations, disguising the messages' real origin.
Much of the legal scuffling in this week's news seemed to originate with unsuspecting operators who certainly were not consciously committing unlawful acts. All this seems to indicate that even the most well-meaning Web hosts may be blissfully ignorant of how close they may be to involvement in some serious legal matters.