Is ISP monitoring and sometimes subsequently blocking of transmitted email content illegal?

[Roland Perry]

In article <5349355D.6060804 at zen.co.uk>, Peter Fairbrother 
<zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk> writes
>To give a made-up and totally spurious example, suppose you talk to 
>Tuvalu a lot. They might want to know whether the traffic to Tuvalu 
>comes from a few customers, or from many. They might want to change 
>their peering arrangements (how they pay for traffic on other people's 
>networks, and how they get paid for passing traffic from other ISPs on 
>their network) with traffic to and from Tuvalu, eg if it's very 
>expensive and only a few people use it then they might want to 
>encourage you to go elsewhere.

The Internet doesn't use circuit switching where each active subscriber 
end-to-end circuit generates a bill, nor is it generally possible to 
know where traffic will ultimately end up geographically.

For these and many other reasons it normally doesn't cost an ISP here 
more if the traffic is heading for Tuvalu rather than New York[1]. The 
ISP in Tuvalu, on the other hand will be paying more for all of their 
offshore connectivity as a result of having to lease lines to a distant 
International Peering point, which will be reflected in what they charge 
end users.

[1] And most of the servers for .tv domains are probably somewhere like 
NY anyway.
-- 
Roland Perry