Skip to content
Blog hero-min-2
13 October, 2023

How to solve national content regulations and blocking requirements for ISPs once and for all

Almost each larger country has some kind of national regulations concerning websites hosting illegal content – and ISPs have to block access to those websites.

 

Hard-to-follow instructions

More often than not the regulations are issued by multiple government bodies, different bureaus or judicial instances. And not all of them are using the same norm for sharing the blocklists.

This makes it hard to follow which places to check for new requirements and how to do it the most effectively – and as we all know, especially for smaller ISPs time is the most valuable resource. Constantly verifying multiple sources of information can be tedious and the time could be well spent elsewhere; and it is very ill-advised to ignore the requirements, since the sanctions can be severe.

 

Not abiding by the content regulations might cost hundreds of thousands Euros

For example in Italy, if an ISP does not make sure to enforce the national regulations stemming from the legislative acts, they risk €50,000–€250,000 fines. For many ISPs, this kind of financial loss could mean losing their business.

 

Not everything is bot-friendly

As tech-savvy as most ISPs are, one would say that it is not that hard to create a bot who would check the sources periodically to make sure the ISP abides by all necessary blocklists – unfortunately that is not always possible, since many of the statements and updates are often not in a machine-readable format or are locked behind some kind of gate.

Moreover, it is possible that anything on the website the bot is checking changes and in that case one might have to start with the work from scratch.

 

How to make sure you automatically comply with the national regulations?

Whalebone’s secure DNS resolver Peacemaker filters traffic using local governmental regulations, pre-defined categories, and ISP’s own rules. Moreover, if your country requires some kind of extra content filtration options, it is achievable thanks to advanced Peacemaker tiers which enable you to create more policies for people to choose from (also opening the possibility to monetize it).

To start with Peacemaker, just contact our experts for a free trial (which takes less than hour to set-up).

Related readings