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Deutsch: Irland: Ausländische Wettseiten könnten gesperrt werden

The Irish government plans to block foreign betting websites. The Betting (Amendment) Bill 2012 would allow the District Court to make orders as follows:

“in the case of a remote bookmaker or remote bookmaking intermediary, an order that telecommunications service providers and internet service providers in the State shall not permit access to: (i) the internet address of any internet domain that the remote bookmaker or remote betting intermediary concerned uses for the purposes of conducting his business,
(ii) a particular facility in such a domain, or
(iii) any other order that that court considers appropriate for the purpose of ensuring that any such domain, or any remote bookmaking operation conducted by the remote bookmaker or remote betting intermediary concerned is not accessible to persons in the State.”

As TJ McIntyre from EDRi member Digital Rights Ireland comments, “the reference to internet "service" providers rather than internet "access" providers appears to be wide enough to cover any service provider which could be used to access a site - which would appear to include providers of VPNs, search engines, DNS providers and others. This wide power is then further supplemented by a power to make "any other order" that (the) court considers "appropriate" to ensure that the domain etc. "is not accessible". This seems to be drafted with a view to ordering that sites should be delisted from search engines but could, potentially, be used against any internet intermediary and could be used to, for example, block access to proxy sites and other tools which might be used to circumvent the blocking.”

The Irish government plans come as a surprise as there are no other previous governmental documents recommending this action. Quite the contrary; the 2008 report Regulating Gaming in Ireland contains a warning against site blocking: “The Committee is of the view that censorship of the Internet in an effort to achieve such ends is frequently self-defeating, is unlikely to achieve the intended results, leads to the diversion of scarce law enforcement resources and frequently has unintended and undesirable consequences.” The same conclusions are restated in the 2010 report “Options for Regulating Gambling” which contains no recommendation of blocking systems.

According to the recent European Commission Staff Working Paper on Online Gambling, blocking access to websites is useless as it and can be easily circumvented. And also dangerous as, “depending on the technology used, website blocking can impact on legitimate businesses. The efficiency of the blocking method furthermore depends on the validity of the list of blocked websites. Keeping the list up-to-date requires significant resources while internet addresses can be changed instantly. Lastly, ISPs are faced with the implementation of the provisions for blocking access to websites, not only implying costs and tying-up of resources but also creating potential liability issues.”

Besides the futility of the action, forcing ISPs to block a type of websites will only create a precedent which may lead to the extension of this purpose to other types of websites.

Internet betting: Irish government seeks to introduce blocking on no evidence and against EU findings (25.10.2012)
http://www.tjmcintyre.com/2012/10/irish-government-block-internet-gamb...