Your Internet Villain for 2019? Mozilla (DoH), Trump or EU Copyright

The UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has published a list of finalists for the “Internet Hero” and “Internet Villain” categories at this year’s forthcoming annual internet industry awards, although the decision to put Mozilla under the Villain category for their DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) push may be contentious.

Apparently the candidates can all expect to be scrutinised by the ISPA’s Council and the winners will then be announced at a gala ceremony on the 11th July 2019 at the Sheraton Grand Park Lane Hotel in London. A full short-list for other categories, including several for broadband ISPs, has already been unveiled (here).

At this point it’s worth noting that the ISPA’s Internet Villain category took a vacation from last year’s event but it’s back for 2019 and has already provided a few talking points.

ISPA Internet Hero

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – for spearheading the ‘Contract for the Web’ campaign to rebuild trust and protect the open and free nature of the Internet in the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

Andrew Ferguson OBE, Editor, Thinkbroadband – for providing independent analysis and valuable data on the UK broadband market since the year 2000.

Oscar Tapp-Scotting & Paul Blaker, Global Internet Governance Team, DCMS – for leading the UK Government’s efforts to ensure a balanced and proportionate agenda at the International Telecommunications Union Conference.

ISPA Internet Villain

Mozilla – for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK.

Article 13 Copyright Directive – for threatening freedom of expression online by requiring ‘content recognition technologies’ across platforms.

President Donald Trump – for causing a huge amount of uncertainty across the complex, global telecommunications supply chain in the course of trying to protect national security.

The biggest talking point above is perhaps the decision to stick Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird etc.) under the villain category for their DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) solution (see here and here for context). The issue being that DoH may cause some headaches for ISPs and their controls, although at its core DoH is still fundamentally about trying to improve the privacy and security of internet traffic. In theory you could put Mozilla as a hero too.

However Mozilla is up against some stiff competition. On the one hand we have Trump and his excessive Huawei restrictions, which impacted a global supply chain (here). On the other hand we have the highly controversial automated filtering aspect – Article 13 – of the EU’s new Copyright Directive (here).