Chief among them, though, are the private short-term rental properties available to rent online through intermediary websites such as Airbnb.
The third issue the EFF is concerned with is that of intermediary liability, which burdens ISPs and websites with stricter copyright infringement laws in a way that is veiled censorship, cautions Sutton.
The insurance companies are at the end of the signup process -- the Obamacare exchange website is nothing more than an intermediary or "marketplace -- and if you buy insurance through it, eventually your data is sent to the insurance company you have selected (at least, that's the way it is supposed to work).
Once a seller is found, the website acts as a sort of intermediary or escrow service, holding the money until both parties are verified and the transaction is completed.
The bill should be pruned and tightened by defining more narrowly the kinds of websites that intermediaries can be asked to block, and by removing the requirement that ISPs put filters in place to ensure that it makes life harder for malefactors without damaging the internet or imposing unreasonable costs on the law-abiding.The battle over SOPA is a fight between two hugely creative forces.
It will also extend Ofgem's powers to third-party intermediaries, such as comparison websites.
This would make internet intermediaries like Google, Facebook and, indeed, anyone with a website into a copyright cop.
Thus Honeywell, a computer company that has relied heavily on intermediaries to sell its products, has created myplant.com, a website that solves problems for managers of large industrial plants.
However, he always remained strongly aware of his intermediary status, as he explained when I interviewed him in 2003 for the website Midnight Eye: "My interest in Japan is – in a literal sense of course, but in sort of a metaphorical sense – that I'm using the idea of the outsider, the foreigner, as my own vehicle as well.
A Paris Match reporter who saw the video, Frédéric Helbert, said on the magazine's website today that he was "offered the possibility to view it" through intermediaries linked to rescue workers sifting through wreckage.
