I keep thinking about our experience at Christmas, when we set up my Mom for broadband, and the local ISP thought it was just fine to send her home with a DSL modem to plug into her Win98 box; no warnings, no education, no firewalls. This is just not OK. We have all sorts of regulation in place to ensure that drivers are equipped with reasonably safe gear and have some basic education on how to proceed safely. Similarly, we regulate residential construction and investment dealers and employers and manufacturers, and this is a good thing. So I think we need some legislation in place that says if someone’s computer gets hacked through no fault of their own and inflicts damage on some Internet user somewhere, the ISP is liable for that damage unless they can show they took some minimal effort to explain to their customers that the Internet is a dangerous place, but that you can be safe if you follow a few simple precautions.
