He is, he says, 'the one who would be stuck with implementing these measures'. His first problem with the measures is that the police are looking to the ISPs to do the work of the legal system. His belief is that 'censorship and the restriction of speech may only lawfully be performed by parliament or by a court'. What is more, he feels that the Met's letter contains a clear indication that if they think the ISPs have got it wrong, they will bring 'what can only be construed as a malicious prosecution'. The central problem of this issue is the responsibility that ISPs have for the material that is displayed.
Publishers consider material and make a conscious decision to distribute.
Librarians and newsagents, while they are likely to be making many more transactions than publishers, are still making a positive decision to purchase. The role of an ISP is to make an area of space available for people to use for communication. To give them the problem of policing this space creates the obvious ethical difficulties but it throws up more practical problems too. First of all there is the simple time factor. With hundreds of postings being made every day, asking a provider to read every mail message to check for something offensive is like expecting a library assistant on a returns counter to look through every book to make sure no latter day Orton or Halliwell has defaced any of the pictures or altered any of the text.