Adult content blocks on mobile ISPs

[Roland Perry]

In article <27719475-43C8-4750-94DF-E148184F497E at batten.eu.org>, Ian 
Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> writes
>It's very rare for any utility company to offer more than "best 
>efforts", with service-level-agreements almost unknown for domestic 
>consumers.
>
>But on the other hand, they can't escape the "reasonable skill and 
>care" test.  What would be reasonable skill and care?  With broadband, 
>"consumer" broadband connections are de facto >99.9% available, and an 
>ISP who delivered 80% and said "best efforts" would probably struggle 
>to enforce its contracts (ie, if my ISP delivered 80% availability, I'd 
>stop payment and argue they'd breached their side of the contract). 
> But a filtering solution certainly isn't going to be 99.9% effective, 
>so what does "best efforts" imply?

Different percentages for different activities. For example, my current 
ISP seems to be a consistent basket case on Saturday evenings, which I 
assume is a result of too many iPlayer users in the vicinity. But ask me 
if I have the energy to sue them to provide anything like the connection 
speed they sold me. [For the avoidance of doubt I don't mind that my "up 
to 8Mbit" turns out to be 4Mbit, that's just my distance from the 
exchange and the laws of physics. What I do mind is my non-streaming 
throughput dropping way below 4Mbit too often.]

>They're C20 because the whole issue is C20.  If the publishers won't 
>rate, and the intermediary cannot rate, how can blocking work

Most people think it can't work very well, unless you have someone like 
the IWf working very hard to produce a small and accurate block list.

 From my experience of the mobile phone web blocking, it suffers from a 
degree of Scunthorpe effect that would be amusing if it wasn't so daft.
-- 
Roland Perry