Liabilities in ISP Business

Legal liability by definition is “obligations under law arising from civil actions or under contract. Legal liability can only be decided by courts even if the settlement is made out of the court by mutual agreement. Legal liability is the legal bound obligation to pay debts 3. For the ISPs legal liability can arise from violating any copyright liability, trademark liability, contract law and fraud and defamation.
Moral responsibility can refer to two different but related things. First an entity has moral responsibility for a situation if that entity has an obligation to ensure that something happens. Second an entity has moral responsibility for a situation when it would be correct to morally praise or blame that entity for the situation. According to Joel Feinberg, among others said that corporations and other groups of people can have what is called ‘collective moral responsibility’ for a state of affairs 4. In cnet news Janet Kornblum wrote an article about how a U.K. based ISP took down an Internet freedom controversial web site that many believe to have supports for terrorists 5. This is an example of a morally responsible ISP.
Accountability is a concept in ethics and governance with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as responsibility, answerability, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving. For ISPs accountability can arise from its user suffering from attacks from hackers and spammers.
Internet Service Providers provide services of bringing the internet connectivity to its users. Some of the ISP companies claim that they bring high speed internet service to its users. However, when users start getting SPAM emails, a portion of the delivery cost is passed onto the users in the form of wasted network bandwidth, increased strain on the utilization of system resources and disk storage space.
Richard Spinello argues that, these SPAMs are morally objectionable as SPAMs have harmful consequences as well as it violates the individual autonomy of Internet users. Spinello also says that SPAMs in addition degrades the fragile ecology of the Internet. Another example of inconvenience is defamation which is the communication that harms the reputation of another and lowers that person’s self esteem in the eyes of the community. Freedom of speech is our constitutional right. However, we all are morally responsible for what we say and the impact of that to others and the society. So, ISP should be morally accountable for what they allow their users to post in their hosting servers. However, Richard Spinello argues that, simply because an ISP presents an occasion for defamation does not necessarily imply that ISP is accountable. For an ISP to be accountable, to conditions are required:
a) The ISP must also have had some capability to do have done something about the defamation.
b) The ISP failed but failed to take action.
However, if the ISP promptly removes the defamatory remarks, issues a retraction on behalf of the victim and initiates good faith effort to track down the originator so that the defamation does not reoccur, then the ISP fulfilled their moral accountability and responsibility. Anton Vedder also argues that ISPs should be morally responsible for harm caused to individuals.
From the utilitarian view point, SPAMs, attacks, and speech that is communicated using any ISP’s electronic forums negatively effects a great number of users therefore it cannot be good. So, ISP is morally accountable and responsible for any content that is presented to the subscribers using the media that ISP provides.
Applying Vedder’s and Spinello’s arguments to the Amy Boyer case of cyberstalking it appears that Tripod and Geocities should be held accountable for the harm caused to Amy Boyer. Because, the ISPs had the capability to bring down the sites that contributed to the stocking and had contents about Boyer including threats. ISPs didn’t remove those contents. The ISPs also didn’t track down the originator of the contents in their server to ensure no harm is cause to the victim.

References:
1. Herman T. Tavani. (2007). “Ethics & Technology – Chapter 9”.

2. Arthur Sullivan and Steven M Sheffrin. (2003). Economics: Principles in action, Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

3. David T. Risser. (2006). Collective Moral Responsibility.

4. Janet Kornblum. (September 18, 1997). ISP censorship seen as trend, Cnet news.