ISPA announces finalists for 2019 Internet Heroes and Villains: Trump and Mozilla lead the way as Villain nominees

The Internet Services Providers’ Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2019 Internet Hero and Villain.

At a time where technology and the Internet has become fully mainstream and a driver of innovation and growth, the policy challenges presented by this disruption are now some of the biggest issues facing policymakers around the world.

The Internet Hero nominations this year include those campaigning to improve trust and confidence online; mapping out the UK’s evolving broadband landscape; and working on global internet governance issues. While, the Villain nominees take in the impact of new technical standards on existing online protections, the balance between freedom of expression and copyright online and the global telecoms supply chain.

Following weeks of consultation and a large range of nominations received via email and Twitter from the public, this year’s nominations for the 2019 Internet Heroes and Villains in full are:

ISPA Internet Hero

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – for spearheading the ‘Contract for the Web’ campaign to rebuild trust and protect the open and free nature of the Internet in the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web

Andrew Ferguson OBE, Editor, Thinkbroadband - for providing independent analysis and valuable data on the UK broadband market since the year 2000

Oscar Tapp-Scotting & Paul Blaker, Global Internet Governance Team, DCMS – for leading the UK Government’s efforts to ensure a balanced and proportionate agenda at the International Telecommunications Union Conference

ISPA Internet Villain

Mozilla – for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK

Article 13 Copyright Directive – for threatening freedom of expression online by requiring ‘content recognition technologies’ across platforms

President Donald Trump – for causing a huge amount of uncertainty across the complex, global telecommunications supply chain in the course of trying to protect national security

The winners of this year’s Heroes and Villains will be chosen by the ISPA Council, and will be announced at the ISPA Awards Ceremony on 11th July in London.