ISPs More Than Traffic Conduit

According to a story from the CBC, at least one Canadian IPS has been intercepting web traffic to customers and modifying it to display information for its own purposes. For those who don't understand how web traffic works, this is easy. Web pages are nothing more than pages of ordinary text with special control codes embedded. As your browser encounters the control codes, it adjusts the display of the text accordingly, including changing fonts and colors, altering spacing, and inserting graphics downloaded from the web. So modifying traffic requires nothing more than programs that watch what is coming in and inserting the additional text and control codes to change the display. The example in the article is of the ISP adding something at the top third of the search page that comes down from Google.

There are a number of concerns that immediately rise:

• Because an ISP is handling and redirecting all traffic to and from its customers - which is must do if Internet traffic is to actually go where it's supposed to - it can monitor everything a person looks at or wants to see. That extends to email, as well. An ISP that decides to operate without ethics leaves someone completely open to spying, even if the person is using an anonymizing service, because the traffic still comes back to his or her account.


• Because so much content on the web is copyrighted - other than that that has passed into the public domain or that was placed their by its owners - I think there's an argument to be made that such sort of activity is commercial use of that content, and an infringement on the copyright.


• If you remember the Orwell novel 1984, the powers that be constantly changed history to eliminate the ability of people to independently verify what they were hearing. This opens the possibility of changing what people see on the fly at whim. If a country's government doesn't like a given story, it could force ISPs to insert changed copy to alter the implications and sense of the report. This would be censorship on a scale that few if any of us have ever imagined - other than Orwell.
Those who have mindlessly chirped about how the Internet has freed the world and put all the power in the hands of "the people" should sit for a moment and consider just what people might have the power, and whether Internet communications could just as easily make things worse as better.