The travels of Justin

I found this after a visit to http://canada.info-syn.com:

Telus is blocking access to a pro-union website that it argues “contains confidential proprietary information and that photographs on the site raise privacy and security issues for certain of its employees.” Michael Geist reminds us that internet service providers—especially Telus—have argued vocally to let the courts, not companies, decide what should and should not be blocked.

Telus says the website, www.voices-for-change.com, contains confidential corporate information while photos of Telus managers with captions like “pieces of scum” and “weasels” are offensive and potentially dangerous.

While I haven’t examined either blocked site, voices-for-change.com or telusscabs.ca, it wouldn’t shock me if the company did have a legitimate argument. Regardless, if the company honestly believed the material posted was in violation of Canadian law, a court injunction would force the website to be blocked by ALL internet service providers.

“We’re not apologizing for taking action for protecting our employees,” Telus vice-president of business solutions Bruce Okabe told 24 hours yesterday. “It would be morally negligent for us to tolerate this kind of behaviour.” [Ed. emphasis added]

By NOT bringing this matter to court and choosing to block the site for Telus subscribers only, Telus seems to be demonstrating a belief that their moral negligence is limited to their own subscribers while subscribers using Shaw, etc., do not provide a threat to the employees in question.

Reported at:

• 24 Hours Vancouver
• Boing Boing
• The Edmonton Sun

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 1:24 am and is filed under Business, Canadian Politics, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.