+1 for A&A, I particularly like the option on account signup to choose between Censored and Uncensored Internet Access. If you pick censored it advises you to try another ISP :) There's also a great bit of text that counters the "without filtering how do we control bad guys on the internet" argument... "We do not have, in our network, any equipment installed to filter access to any part of the public Internet for our customers as a whole. We will give 12 months notice if we ever add any such filtering. This claim relates to the passing or normal unicast IPv4 and IPv6 packets to and from the public Internet based on the appropriate standards and RFCs. This means packets can be dropped because a link is full or there is a technical fault, or because they are malformed in some way, or clearly spoofed or incorrect source addresses. In the case of some sort of attack we can take steps to manage that. Only packets actually addressed to your IP addresses will get to you, and similarly only packets from you that are from your IP addresses will get to the Internet (BCP38). We don't control the rest of the Internet and so cannot bypass corporate or national firewalls or filtering outside of our network. However, we aim to deal with peers and carriers that have similarly open policies where possible. An unfiltered service does not give you any right to do anything wrong or illegal, and we can, of course suspend your service for breach of our AUP or non payment. You can run your own firewall or restrictions on your own network or ask us to set up such firewalls for you. Parents are advised to supervise their children's use of the Internet and consider parental controls as appropriate. We do this because censorship is a bad idea. Even a small amount of censorship for a good cause is the thin end of the wedge and ultimately leads to restriction of free speech. Bear in mind that we may have to restructure your contract for service to be with another company or other legal mechanisms to avoid censorship or monitoring orders."

Thanks Valve!

Yes, there are lots of smaller ISP's in the UK that tend to offer much better service than the big players. I suspect that many of these users will be moving to a smaller provider. Also the big providers tend to offer deals with TV/Phone/Broadband/Kitchen Sink etc etc which aren't actually that great value for money if you don't care about their "value added" catch up TV services, which are mainly inferior versions of iPlayer. I would imagine with people looking a little more critically at their finances these days people will be dumping the addon rubbish, noticing that without this their deal isn't actually that good and moving to a specialised ISP that just gives broadband access at a decent price.

Err, didn't they try this before and users hated it and it's invasion of privacy so much that it nearly caused a court case? What's changed to make it different this time? Oh look, nothing, they're just hoping everyone's forgotten already...

This is actually a good result. Having worked at a UK solicitors (IANAL, I was in IT, this is Slashdot after all...) I know that pretty much the only thing they are scared of is the SRA. Every practising legal firm in the UK requires a license from these guys, no license = no firm, and hopefully this is what will result here.

There is a mechanism for doing this kind of thing already in Windows, via Add/Remove programs and Group Policy. Surely it would be a good idea to try and re-use this rather than re-inventing the wheel.