Child abuse unit paying for data

[Richard Clayton]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

In article <4oVzY2ntmvdJFAzw@perry.co.uk>, Roland Perry <lists@internetp
olicyagency.com> writes

>I think Jim's conflating (and he won't be the first or last person) the 
>role of connectivity ISPs and that of content providers.

Sadly so -- he seems to think that the ISPs from which he obtains the
information about who was using 10.0.0.1 last Tuesday evening are the
same people who are making money from the adverts on MySpace...

... he hasn't even got the country right :(

>But that goes well beyond what the article on the website says, where he 
>seemed to be happy to pay to get details of perpetrators, but not to get 
>details of victims.

No.

Having listened to the Today piece and read the BBC news report, he's
saying that he thinks the police should pay if they are tracking down a
murderer who dropped an email at the crime scene (he's disrupting the
normal business of ISPs by getting them to help out), but that since
there wouldn't be online paedophile activity if there wasn't an
"online", then the ISPs should view the resultant data requests as part
of the cost of doing business.

This is superficially attractive, but it hasn't happened in the UK
because there was a payment regime in place long ago for the telcos and
that has been carried forward for the ISPs.

The payment scheme is "cost recovery", which sounds fine because the
telcos and ISPs cannot make a profit from the activity. However, it also
means that there is no incentive on them to invest in order to reduce
costs -- so there would be a strong economic argument for a flat rate
payment across the industry, and if that meant that some companies made
money because they were efficient then so be it.

The other problem with not paying telcos/ISPs for data is that since
they will definitely lose money they may see an advantage to rate
limiting requests (thereby slowing down the rate of loss of money) by
being extremely slow in responding...  this is not in public interest.

All in all, if there wasn't a payment scheme then the case for
introducing one might be hard to make; but since there is such a scheme
the case for rescinding it is also flaky...   so it would be better, in
my view, to carry on as we are, and for CEOP to sort out its budget
submissions to better reflect what they're doing.

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1

iQA/AwUBSXcmDpoAxkTY1oPiEQIjdQCfbuehmpURVYCljKH2AqtLeO8KccwAoNah
N8Ff8vABbg28FWmOpizmAWmf
=gGrz
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----