Adam Gifford: Daily battle but we have to look out for ourselves online

Bad things happen on the internet. Being connected to the wild world web more often leads to dystopia than the utopia envisaged by its early prophets.

As the spammers fill your mailbox with penis pill offers and ponzi schemes, Nigerians offer untold wealth, phishers ask you to check your bank account details and virus writers try to recruit your machine into a zombie army, it is clear something needs to be done.

Or is it? How about buying anti-virus software (or switching to a Mac), taking some time to learn how to filter out the spam, applying a little common sense to all those too-good-to-be-true offers?

InternetNZ has again proposed a code of practice for the self-regulation of internet service providers. It says the task fits in with its mission "to promote and protect the internet". "Who made you the queen?" many ISPs may well ask.

InternetNZ created such a code in 1999, but the biggest ISPs, including Telecom's Xtra, did not sign up and no complaints procedure was ever implemented.

The society does not represent ISPs. It is just a body of concerned people which has representative status because of a philosophical view that "internet users" rather than governments should be responsible for the internet.

The State Service Commission's e-government unit report Trust and Security on the internet recommended ISPs and internetNZ should do something for internet users whose systems were hit by hackers or viruses.

That internetNZ cites a bureaucratic invention such as the e-government unit as justification for this proposed code is a good indication we are entering make-work land here.

Consumer confidence, trust, protection - who could be opposed to that? Who could be opposed to freedom and democracy? Who could not be opposed to weapons of mass destruction? Found any yet?

Talking up internet nasties opens the door for regulation or legislation. The e-government unit has recommended larger involvement by the Government in internet governance, turning on its head a decade of efforts by enlightened civil servants to keep the ponderous hand of Government off the tiller.

The problem we have in New Zealand is not too much of anything on the internet, but not enough internet.

The Government's protection of Telecom's near-monopoly, and even subsidy of it through the Probe "broadband" project, means customers are paying too much for throttled-down service.

We don't have the problem of spammers setting up shop here because none of the ISPs would stomach the traffic, and there aren't enough PCs on true high-speed broadband connections to make a useful zombie army.

The Department of Internal Affairs has been active in identifying and closing down traders in illegal porn, without requiring huge rewrites of the law.

The rate of adoption of internet modes of doing things is driven by economic and social factors rather than trust issues. If people use computers for some aspect of their work or lives, they will find their way online sooner or later. Once connected, it becomes hard to disconnect.

So what is likely to be in the code?

It will set out obligations of ISPs and consumers. Many of these will be obvious and are already provided for in consumer protection laws such as the Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Guarantees Act.

The code will ensure ISPs do things such as disclosing all charges and billing practices, making customers aware of what support they can expect and its cost and making clear the quality and technical characteristics of a service.

That is unlikely to be much use as long as Telecom, which sets most of the conditions for the market and doesn't sign such codes, continues to treat bandwidth as a scarce and expensive commodity.

One of the most common grumbles one hears is about people exceeding their data cap for whatever reason - upgrading a big program, experimenting with video, the kids going crazy downloading Lithuanian dance beats - and being hit with a painful surcharge.

Those problems go away if people are able to buy enough bandwidth at a reasonable price.

How about a regime in which ISPs are penalised if they throttle back speeds too far? Rebates for dropped connections? Discounts if their virus or spam filters let nasties through?

A lot of the stuff internetNZ is proposing should be obvious. It says customers should be able to change service providers without undue difficulty, getting email redirected for a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost.

If any ISP doesn't do this, maybe internetNZ may be better off taking a test case under what it says is the applicable legislation, the provisions of the Commerce Act relating to competition and unfair market practices.

Having proposed the code, internetNZ won't even be round to manage it.

Instead, it proposes an independent executive be set up of ISP and consumer representatives to monitor and make any changes.

It can have a valid role as a lobbyist.

But it should not create unnecessary layers of regulation to in some way justify its existence.