To follow up on Telus’s ill-advised censorship during the recent labour action, I recently read on Boing Boing that the company blocked 766 other sites along with the offending one.
Tests undertaken by the ONI on July 27, 2005 showed that Telus’s blocking extended to far more than the single targeted site. Telus’s filtering also blocked 766 additional, unrelated sites with domain names hosted on the same server as the blocked site. These sites included http://www.airgasengineering.com/, an engineering company; http://www.boogieforbreastcancer.org/, a breast cancer fundraising site; http://www.medicinemodernlife.com/, an alternative medicine site based in Australia; and http://www.mountainrecyclers.com/, a Colorado based electronic recycling company.
It’s always the first problem that arises with censorship–innocent material inevitably gets censored. In this case, Telus threw out 766 babies with the bathwater.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I find this type of company policy abhorrent. How disgusting, that a company such as Telus, should decide for us what we should review online.
And, we live in a country with free speech? Doesn’t seem that way, if companies can get away with any kind of censorship.
NetChick: Actually, that’s a bit of a misnomer. Not only do we not have free speech (we have freedom of expression, which is slightly different), it doesn’t apply to corporations. They own the network, they can legally block whatever they want.
However, they do get into a nest of other problems by doing that, such as arguably losing their “common carrier” status.
Not to mention, they gain the label of “Stupid” for blocking not just a site, but an entire server. Seriously, what the fuck?
I’m pretty sure ‘common carrier’ is an american thing as well.
No, common carrier is a Canadian thing. I spent four years studying this in the Communications program at SFU. The department is in love with the term.