Perhaps the nastiest aspect of current UK censorship laws is that you don't even have to quite threaten an ISP with a libel action to force them to remove a web site. When faced with a known serial litigant like Laurence Godfrey, most ISPs would quail before even a veiled insinuation, for fear of facing legal costs like the nearly £500,000 Demon Internet had to pay out.

Shortly after that, things got truly absurd, when the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain was forced to move to the US to escape censorship!

"They wrote to me on 29th March giving me two hours to fax them an assurance from a solicitor that our site did not contain any defamatory content and asking for a written guarantee that it never would. I was out of the office working in Parliament, and returned to find our Web site suspended and an error message where it used to be.

Continuing:

Remember, the burden of proof is on the ISP to prove everything on the site they are hosting is true. How could the ISP be sure of such a blanket statement? (Please note I do not intend to cast the ISPs as the culprits of anything; they are reacting perfectly rationally to bad law.)

"The printing company tore up the letter because they know the type of magazine Outcast is and know that the editorial team can be trusted. However, our Web site company -- NetBenefit PLC -- was not so sure."

"On 17th March, Mishcon de Reya, one of the biggest firms of media lawyers in the UK, wrote to Outcast, and the company that prints our magazine, and the company that hosts our Web site, stating that if we ever published anything defamatory, they would sue us. They were representing one of our rivals, the Pink Paper. We thought, 'fine,' because we didn't intend to publish anything defamatory. Outcast is a controversial magazine but we know how far we can go, and we'd never deliberately print anything untrue."

Slashdot: What happened, Chris?

Shortly after that, the first publicized victim of this policy emerged, a controversial magazine named Outcast. The owner of the site was interviewed by Slashdot:

The reason is that under current UK legislation, ISPs become responsible for the content of sites they host once they receive complaints about it. ... The implication is that for an ISP, having received a complaint about a site it is hosting, by far the safest and easiest course of action is to pull the plug.