Last Saturday, I wrote about the UK ISP trade group that decided to nominate Mozilla for the annual Internet Villain award for the crime of making DNS lookup safer and more secure. Of course, it also made it harder for the ISPs to spy on their users, build profiles of their interests, and redirect bad DNS requests to a page that tries to sell the mistaken domain. You can see why they were upset.
Don’t worry they say. It was all a joke. Just a little lighthearted humor. And besides, we’ve withdrawn the nomination even though we still think they’re guilty as hell. The Register decided on a bit of lighthearted humor of their own. They were merciless in their ridicule of the group, its behavior, and its inadequate apology. The takedown is worth reading even if you don’t care about the issues.
The piece begins with “The brain-dead Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has backtracked on its nomination of Mozilla as an ”internet villain“ for 2019 after online outcry.” and ends with “ISPA is another warm chunk of sloppy garbage floating in the toxic hell soup of the modern internet that’s made the 2010s so joyless and tiresome at times. Ah, oops, there we go again, being all light-hearted and that.”
Sandwiched between those two quotes is a takedown so devastating that I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see the ISPA disband. Or at least change their name. One thing for sure, no one is going to take them seriously anymore.