The Internet Service Provider Factor

Internet Service Provider's Responsibility

Internet Service Providers have become responsible for many things over the years.

• Protecting customers from SPAM
• Protecting customers from viruses
• Protecting customers from specific illegal content
• Providing consistant bandwidth for their users
• Maintaining the Internet Backbone

These sound like great things, but many consumers do not realize how some of these things are may affect them.

Internet Service Providers have the power to filter your mail and even block you from sending or receiving mail they deem as harmful.
ISPs tend to block the outgoing port for sending mail so you can not send outgoing mail from a mail client such as Outlook, Mac Mail, or Thunderbird unless you are using the outgoing mail server supplied by your ISP.

Internet Service Providers have the power to filter what IP addresses you can access. Many web hosting companies have 800 to 1,000 customers on a single, shared IP address. If the ISP finds a single site with a virus or a phishing site, it can choose to block all IP addresses owned by that hosting provider. Your website might appear to be down to you, but someone with a different ISP might be able to access the site with no problem

Internet Service Providers have the power to filter what subject content you can access. Many countries have censorship of certain subjects. This includes the US. While many people will agree with the decision in 2008 for ISPs to block access to child pornography, it is still a step to censorship in the US that could lead to further internet restrictions later. Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Internet is really not a reality. An Internet Service Provider only has to add a single line of code to block a domain name or IP address for all of it's users. In 2008 Pakistan had an incident where the government, attempting to block YouTube from the country entered the information incorrectly and blocked the entire world access to YouTube.

Currently ISPs are talking about disabling or charging extra for high bandwidth items running to ensure that there is not too much strain on the system and users do not experience slowness in the signal. This means that your Internet Service Provider may choose to block features of a website from sending data. High bandwidth usage occurs with video or music streaming, online graphic games, Internet Messaging systems, Flash content, and several other things. Some internet service providers already block some of this material. If there is something on your website that is not running, it may be that it was blocked as a high bandwidth item.

Internet Service Providers have to pay high costs to maintain their systems. They allow customers from other ISP companies to use their lines to reach a destination. Sometimes ISPs block the traffic across their system. In 2008 Sprint and Cogent got into a legal battle. It was costing Sprint too much money to maintain the open lines for the large number of Cogent customers, so Sprint blocked traffic. Cogent customers could not get to any internet destination that needed a Sprint line to get to and Sprint customers could not get to any destination crossing a Cogent line. If you were a Sprint customer and your web site was on a web hosting server that was carried by Cogent- you would not have been able to pull up your web site or get email.