It would actually make online copyright stronger than copyright for good-ole paper and staple publications. Companies could copyright things like the white pages, which are just collections of facts and which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled could not to be protected by copyright due to their non-creative nature. Imagine if Zenith were sued every time someone showed an illegal videotape on their television sets. The effect of this treaty goes even farther than the immediate annoyance of reading its insane and inane regulations. It would have the same effect that the ICC had on the railroad industry, raising barriers to entry and curbing the growth of Internet based publications.
Someone can get a web-zine published for a few orders of magnitude less.
So by increasing the costs of ISP's and also forcing people to pay for every page they download, the anti-competitive tack is clear. We are not saying that we think that the Internet should be given special privileges. The answers, though, lie on the Net itself, in secure servers or one of the various forms of digital cash like Cybercash , and not in railroad-era machinations of the competitive landscape.