Brickbats and bouquets were the order of the day at this year's Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) awards.

Now in its ninth year, the annual awards honour the best services and slate the worst cases of abuse in the industry.

A shortlist of nominations for the Internet Villain of the year included e360 insight, the US company which is suing UK anti-spam organisation Spamhaus. Also included were the British Phonographic Industry and the US Government. However, in the end, Vivianne Reding and the European Commission won this dubious honour.

This, according to a statement from the ISPA, was because Reding and the EC were guilty of “foisting the most arcane set of rules yet seen for prior registration of dot-eu domains, requiring UK registered companies to submit legal affidavits to justify the authenticity of their business.”

However, the awards looked favourably at Annie Mullins, content standards manager at Vodafone who defeated competition from Ofcom, the Home Office team, Stephen Carter, former Ofcom chief executive and the EU to become the ISPA’s internet hero “for her work with the Home Office Task Force on Protection of Children on the Internet and the European Union's Safer Internet Programme”.

The Internet Watch Foundation Award went to the Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet. The ISPA felt the organisation deserved the award “for continuing to provide a hugely successful multi-agency forum enabling a vast array of experts to contribute towards policies and good practice documents to make the internet a safer place for children”.

NTL:Telewest - now Virgin Media - won best consumer ISP award and Orange was given the award for Corporate Social Responsibility. Madasafish won an award for having the best consumer email service and Eclipse Internet was deemed to give the best consumer broadband service.

Tiscali was deemed to have the best portal and Keen Computers won best consumer host award.

Lumison was given the award for having the best internet telephony and West Somerset internet, a small community project set up to give people in the area an alternative internet access, was given the award for best wireless ISP.