Internet Hero and Villain honoured with gongs

Steve Linford, the inspirational anti-spam campaigner and silicon.com Agenda Setter, has won the Internet Hero Award at an ISPA ceremony in London on Thursday night. Domain name and security company VeriSign walked away with the Internet Villain Award.

Probably the most deserved and most predictable award of the evening, Linford and his organisation SpamHaus was honoured for educating people about the problem of spam and battling to thwart spammers.

Meanwhile VeriSign was singled out "for their presumption that they own the internet and the domain name system hijacking scandal", according to ISPA.

VeriSign's triumph came in a too-tough-to-call category where strong competition came from Derek Wyatt MP in particular "for lowering the level of informed debate on the internet generally and spam in particular" - a charge levelled against Wyatt and the All Party Internet Group's anti-spam efforts countless times on the pages of silicon.com.

Other Villains up for nomination included the Broadband Stakeholders Group, The Home Office and the RIAA for its heavy-handed and often misdirected clampdown on file-sharing communities. Others up for nomination in the Hero category included Stephen Timms MP, Richard Thomas and the Office of the Information Commissioner, the Law Commission for England and Wales and Mary Tait from the Department of Trade and Industry.

Easynet were 'The Darkness' of the evening - picking up two awards in the Best Business ISP and Best National Business ISP category - while Google predictably won Best Search Facility. Brightmail scooped Best Third Party Application, Mistral won Best Hosting Provider, Telewest Blueyonder won Best Unmetered Dial-up ISP, Bulldog won Best Consumer Broadband, Fibernet won Best Carrier, Linx won Best Internet Exchange, Tiscali won Best Metred ISP, Fastnet won Best Small Business ISP, Freeserve won Best National Consumer ISP and Electronic Frontier won Best Hardware.

4Learning/The Department for Education and Skills won a special award from the Internet Watch Foundation for developments in online child safety.