The surfing stops here

Nazi memorabilia on sale at Yahoo auctions

By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward

Yahoo will find it almost impossible to stop French users looking at auctions of Nazi memorabilia on its US website say experts.

France's own regulations and the way the internet is organised make it difficult to identify which country a person is in when they look at a website.

The experts warn that any technical solution is going to be piecemeal at best and arbitrary at worst at keeping French people away from the auctions.

They also warn that other countries may follow France's lead and ask foreign websites to comply with laws in their country.

Avoiding auctions

On Monday French Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez gave the internet portal three months to find a way of stopping French users from participating in auctions of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo's US website.

If Yahoo does not comply then it will face daily fines of 100,00 Francs (£9,500).

Last week a three-man panel of experts, that included internet pioneer Vint Cerf, testified to the court that it would be possible for Yahoo to identify about 70% of users who use an identifiably French internet service provider (ISP).

However the way that the internet is organised makes it difficult to be entirely sure who someone is or where they are surfing from.

"Just how do they expect a US company not to offer its services to people on a global network like the internet?" said, Yaman Akdeniz, director of the Cyber-rights and Cyber-Liberties lobby group.

I don't think there is a technical solution," said Mr Akdeniz, "if there was a way of blocking French users you would have thought Yahoo would have done it in the first place."

Address test

Every website you look at on the internet asks for the IP address of the computer you are browsing from. An IP address is like a house number and street name and lets a server know where the images and text from a webpage should be sent.

Unfortunately IP addresses are not allocated on a country by country basis, so simply knowing an IP address is no guide to where the company that owns it is actually located.

According to the Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), which allocates IP addresses throughout Europe, many of the companies registering IP addresses in France are based in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.

Also some ISPs give their subscribers a different IP address every time they log on making it hard to identify just who, or where, someone is every time.

Domain dilemma

French regulations on who can own a domain name ending .fr might also make it harder to identify French web surfers.

Many French companies have not chosen a domain name ending .fr because of the strict rules covering what name people can register. As a result some French companies might be using a .com or .net type address they got from a US-based registrar.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the French subsidiaries of multinationals may be using IP addresses allocated in other countries making it even more difficult to identify just where someone is surfing from.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang told the Liberation newspaper that the attempt to block French users from US sites was "very naive."

Nicholas Lansman, director of the UK's Internet Service Providers Association, said the French court ruling seems to contradict European directives.

"The EC directive on e-commerce says ISPs should be treated as mere conduits," he said, "however other articles say that if something is illegal then ISPs can be asked to remove it."

The question now is whether this ruling covers computers that sit outside Europe, said Mr Lansman.

"It's a serious problem and I don't know how it is going to be resolved," he said, "the worry for the future is that ISPs become liable for what users are looking at and that's a very serious path to go down."