Telus Blocks Union Web Sites and Unintentionally Blocks 766 Other Sites

Telus Inc (Telus), one of Canada's largest ISPs, in the course of a labour dispute with the Telecommunications Workers Union (Union), blocked two web sites associated with the Union. In doing so, however, Telus also unintentionally blocked at least 766 other web sites, including one for an engineering company and one for breast cancer fundraising. The filtering affected almost one million Telus subscribers. Telus obstructed the sites by blocking the IP address of the targets, a technique which is the easiest type of filtering, since an address is merely added to a list on the ISP's routers of blocked addresses. However, because many sites that are unrelated to the targeted sites originate from the same IP address, the blocking of collateral websites is a common side effect of this sort of filtering. A Telus spokesperson said that the Union web sites were blocked because they contained confidential "proprietary information" about Telus and that by posting photos of workers who crossed picket lines the Union put these employees in danger. Further, Telus said that under its customer contracts, it has the right to block certain content, such as child pornography. However, section 36 of the Telecommunications Act provides that "a Canadian carrier shall not control the content or influence the meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public". Most ISPs take the position that content blocking is both out of their control and constitutes an undesirable corporate policy. For an article by the Opennet Initiative, see: http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/ONI-010-telus.pdf For a commentary by Prof Michael Geist, visit: http://makeashorterlink.com/?D2BA12F9B Summary by: Nyall Engfield