Alex Singleton | Journalist and political commentator

BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show today hosted a discussion on whether the UK government needs to impose new laws on the internet to counter internet cons. The debate was between Lord Broers, chairman of Britain’s House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, and Tom Clougherty, Director of Policy at the Adam Smith Institute. Lord Broers was calling for new government initiatives to make internet service providers take action (although he seemed vague in what he actually wanted). Despite a science background, Lord Broers claimed that internet services providers do have not have sufficient incentives at the moment to disconnect customers doing things like sending “phishing” emails. (That’s when an email looks like it’s from a major company, often a bank, but is actually a forgery.)

He’s wrong. Internet service providers already face commercial ruin if they don’t quickly disconnect servers being used for spam and phishing. If you are a service provider, you need your systems to connect to the rest of the internet through a company like the London Internet Exchange (LINX). If a service provider were to ignore their customers’ sending of phishing or spam email, they will get disconnected or blocked from rest of the internet, and forced out of business. Contract law deals with this quite effectively. Phishing is already illegal. Moreover, modern versions of web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer are very good at warning users that sites have been reported as phishing sites.

As Tom pointed out, we don’t expect Royal Mail to inspect every letter in case it contains a con, and it is unrealistic to expect internet providers could somehow do this. He also explained how companies are advising customers that emails may not really be from them: his bank’s online service explains regularly on its screens that the bank will never email asking for his login details.

New government regulations could impose unnecessary costs on service providers and lead to higher prices for consumers, and simply move legitimate web servers overseas where the regulation is lower.