Internet Oscars.. the winners revealed

Freeserve, Telewest and Tiscali emerged victorious in this year's internet Oscars - the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) Awards 2004. The winners were announced at a ceremony at the Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square, London last night - with Popworld’s Simon Amstell the unlikely compere. Telewest took best unmetered dial-up ISP, beating off competition from BT Yahoo, Freeserve, One.Tel and Totalise. Freeserve walked away with the accolade of best national consumer ISP (not Easynet, as the presenter announced), Bulldog Communications picked up the best consumer broadband award (which it duly celebrated by carting a toy bulldog around the ceremony) and Tiscali secured the best metered ISP title. Verisign scooped the unwelcome award of internet villain for “their presumption that they own the internet and the domain name system hijacking scandal”. A man dressed as a burglar ran around the awards grabbing table names to humorously emphasise this point. Steve Linford and anti-spam campaigners Spamhaus picked up the internet hero award and 4Learning won the Internet Watch Foundation award for its “Grid Club”. Google picked up the gong for best search facility. There was no sign of NTL or AOL at the ceremony after the companies declined to enter the Awards this year. A spokesman for AOL said: "We weren't able to meet their testing criteria in the time given, but we will no doubt enter next time round."