PARIS -- A potentially landmark Internet content trial opens Friday in the same courtroom where Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez made worldwide headlines last November by ordering Yahoo to prevent people in France from accessing sites that sell Nazi memorabilia.
This time, a French group is suing a group of French Internet service providers for denying a request to block access to a portal called Front14.org that proudly bills itself, at the top of its homepage, as "Online hate at its best."
The site, until recently run from an Alaska ISP called General Communication Inc., operates websites for several hundred affiliated groups, including "Women for Aryan Unity" and "Las Vegas Skinheads." Other ISPs in Europe, such as Swisscom and Sunrise-Diax in Switzerland, have agreed to block users from accessing the site.
"It's especially for Nazis," said Stéphane Lilti, lead attorney in the case and also vice president of the anti-racism group International Action for Justice, which is bringing the case. "You have a hosting service, a mail service, you have advertising -- anything you need when you want to make a political site."
"In France, never have we asked the provider to block a site. But now it's time to do it, because we have no choice. In the United States you can do nothing, because they have their First Amendment, and that's where all the neo-Nazis go. We want to be protected in France, so we have no choice but to ask the ISPs to do their job. If they don't want to do it, we ask the judge to tell them to do it."
The roster of French ISPs named in the suit includes such heavyweights as AOL France and represents the vast majority of French Internet users, guaranteeing a high profile for the case.
Jean-Christophe Le Toquin, executive director of France's Internet Service Providers Association -- the umbrella group representing the ISPs -- said the legal battle could be fierce. He said the tone of the dispute could easily turn nasty.
"The problem is we would have liked to have had some discussion with the organization that is suing us before we go to court," he said. "We are not so much surprised by the issue, but by the way we are going to court without having any informal, friendly talks with an organization whose goal is close to ours. We both try to lessen the impact of racism on society. So we are disappointed."
The ISPs will defend themselves before Judge Gomez by arguing that under the terms of European Parliament law governing e-commerce, ISPs are not allowed to monitor Internet traffic.
But Lilti, the attorney who will be arguing against the ISPs, made clear that his group is not asking that all Internet traffic be monitored, only that ISPs take action when certain sites are called to their attention.
"We asked them to block the front14 site," he said. "You have to be a racist to be hosted there. It's very easy to do technically. They answered: They don't have to judge the material. They told us they have the duty of neutrality. We don't agree with that. Not that they have a duty to see everything on the Internet, but we signaled them about this site."
Already, he said, the lawsuit seems to have had an impact.
"I filed a complaint against the company hosting the site, but they changed the hosting," he said. "I think they changed it because of my lawsuit. I wrote to the company and asked them to block the site to France. If they want to use it in North America, I don't care. But after that there was not the same hosting company, General Communication Inc."
Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa Law School who specializes in Internet law, said via e-mail that the case before Judge Gomez was potentially significant in that it could provide legal precedent for the first time to put the onus of content-monitoring on ISPs. Typically, he said, such responsibility has only emerged when ISPs host the content.
"This case would take the next step -- actually placing a positive obligation to block," he said.
The economic impact could be substantial, he added, since court-directed regulation of Internet content could put companies in a difficult position. "For example, with AOL France one of the named parties, they might choose to pull out of the country rather than face the risk of liability," he said.
Le Toquin, of the ISP group, hopes to avoid such a drastic outcome.
"We have had a lot of pressure for years from people asking us to filter the Internet, so we are not so surprised that it's happening now," he said.
"We've been working on this issue for four years. What we have done so far is we have a hotline about racism. We are working on a filtering tool, Icra.org, which is an international tool, and for three years since we were set up, we have been trying to fight the racism and harmful content for minors."
