ISPs & Rowdy Web Sites Before the Law: Should We Change Today’s Safe Harbour Clauses?

The paper examines today’s debate on the new responsibilities of the internet service providers (ISPs) in connection with legal problems concerning jurisdiction, data processing, people’s privacy and education. The focus is foremost on the default rules and safe harbour-clauses for ISPs liability, set up by the U.S. and European legal systems. This framework is deepened in the light of the different functions of the services provided on the internet, so as to highlight multiple levels of control over information and, correspondingly, different types of liability. The new responsibilities of ISPs concern the original “end-to-end” architecture of the medium and policies on design, rather than responsibility for user content and individual messages.