Court awards stress damages for Internet blackout

A Trieste judge on Thursday awarded damages worth 2,400 euros to a local woman who was left without Internet for five months and landline connections for one and a half months in 2009. The telephone company was ordered to pay 1,600 euros in material damages for the "digital inequality" caused by the disservice, which prevented the woman, a housewife and mother of three, from exercising her right to educate her children and represented a violation of the right to study. It was also ordered to pay 800 euros in moral damages for the stress caused during the five-month blackout. "It was a nightmare," said the woman. "My daughter used internet to study. I have a mother and other elderly relatives who need to call me often. I was anxious about this too. It was psychologically very distressing".