The High Court ruling may not be depressing depending how BT deals with the issue, although it is a very bad decision.

BT could drop Cleanfeed, and appeal, joining those claiming that enforcing content in this matter is not a scalable solution, not effective, not a suitable role for an ISP, of doubtful legality, and that doing so places it at a competitive disadvantage.

Some of BT’s competitors (Entanet for example) don’t implement a Cleanfeed type solution, and so faced with a similar argument would respond “this isn’t something we currently have the facility to do, the desire, or contractual arrangements with our users”. BT have made a rod for their own back by attempting to censor the Internet, and many folks (myself included) pointed at the IWF Internet censorship and said it won’t work, and people will want to expand it to do more than it does.

My limited experience of IWF censorship was that VirginMedia forgot to add routes from their IWF censorship box to their former Eurobell customers, so when IWF added the single image at Wikipedia (a later image at imgur causes us similar problems) they took out all of Wikipedia for a large fraction of their users for 3 days because it routed the traffic to a filtering proxy but there was no route back. Way to go Virgin Media. More depressing is I had to diagnose and explain this to their engineers because they didn’t Google their own router names (sigh) to discover it was the route to their censorship device.

Meanwhile vote with your feet and pick an ISP who doesn’t spy on your traffic more than is needed to keep the packets flowing. Be sure to tell the old ISP why you left!

Based on facebook comment to Alec Muffett