The protest that took Austria offline for two hours Tuesday has sparked an overnight censorship debate in the nation's media and among Net activists and members of parliament.
"We received a lot of solidarity email," said Peter Purgathofer at the computer science department of Vienna University of Technology. "Within 24 hours, over 2,000 users signed an online petition supporting the shutdown."
On Tuesday, as the nation's ISPs prepared for their 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. blackout, a bill was proposed to give ISPs input on how to address illegal content on the Net, such as child pornography and Nazi propaganda.
The shutdown was prompted by a police raid last week on a Vienna ISP that last year had briefly hosted a member's posts to a pedophile newsgroup.
The Austrian Justice Ministry called the reaction to the raid overblown, but said it will hold an inquiry into police conduct in the matter.
"This debate has been blown out of proportions and has been used by providers to push through their own interests," justice ministry spokesman Gerhard Litzka told Reuters. "The provider wants to make life easier for himself, like every businessman, and every law makes it more difficult for him. But the world isn't that straightforward."
Austrian laws regarding the Internet are vague, but currently ISPs are held accountable for content on their servers, a decree that ISPs say is unreasonable and shows a lack of understanding about the Internet on the part of government officials.
Litzka said the government intends to keep the onus of responsibility on the providers.
"The legal responsibility has to remain with the provider if he knows what's going over his Net," Litzka said, adding that some Internet access companies were fully aware of what their customers put into cyberspace.
But Litzka admitted that authorities still had a lot to learn about the Internet. "We are very interested in a dialog with the providers," he said. "The knowledge is not really sufficient yet."
The Austrian government plans to install a central help line at the interior ministry next month where Internet users can anonymously register pages with offending or illegal content.
