debanqued
@debanqued@beehaw.org
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
A website isn’t a common carrier
The discussion is about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).
you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.
Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality.
Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,
One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.
necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.
It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice.
Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.
Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.
Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?
That was in the linked article.
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
Interstate commerce is governed by the federal government.
Not exclusively. Interstate commerce implies that the feds can regulate it, not that they have exclusive power to do so. We see this with MJ laws. The fed believes it has the power to prohibit marijuana on the basis of interstate commerce, but in fact mj can be grown locally, sold locally, and consumed locally. Just like internet service can be.
Suppose you want to buy a stun gun in New York. You can find stun guns sold via mail order from another state (thus interstate commerce), but New York still managed to ban them despite the role of interstate commerce.
A close analog would be phone laws. The fed has the TCPA to protect you from telemarketers, but at the same time various states add additional legal protections for consumers w.r.t. telemarketing and those laws have force even if the caller is outside the country. (Collecting on the judgement is another matter).
Schools now require the internet for kids. ISPs being allowed to be anything more than a dumb pipe means they have the control of what information is sent across their network.
Education is specifically a service of the state. If you can point to the statute requiring schools to provide internet for students, I believe it will be state law not federal law that you find.
The internet is now a basic human right in the United States for numerous reasons, one of which is #2.
I don’t quite follow. Are you saying that because education is a human right, that internet access is a human right? I don’t think it works that way. First of all, people who do not exercise their right to an education would not derive any rights implied by education. As for the students, if a state requires internet in education that does not mean that internet access becomes a human right. E.g. an Amish family might lawfully opt to homeschool their child, without internet. That would satisfy the right to education enshrined in the Unified Declaration of Human Rights just fine.
Also, if internet could be construed as a human right by some mechanism that’s escaping me, the fed is not exclusively bound by human rights law. The fed signed the treaty, but all governments therein are also bound to uphold human rights. Even private companies are bound to human rights law in the wording of the text, though expectation of enforcement gets shaky.
ISPs cross state boundaries and should be governed by interstate law.
I subscribe to internet service from a WISP. A dude in my neighborhood rolled out his own ISP service. His market did not even exceed the city.
The local ISPs have ISPs themselves and as you climb the supply chain eventually you get into the internet backbone which would be interstate, but that’s not where the netneutrality problem lives. The netneutrality problem is at the bottom of the supply chain, where the end user meets their local ISP. Also with MJ laws, several states have liberated the use of marijuana despite the feds using the interstate commerce act to ban it.
An ISP being a business, especially a publicly-traded one, will sacrifice all manner of consumer/user-protection in order to maximize profit. And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.
Sure, and if the fed is relaxed because the telecoms feed the warchests of the POTUS and Congress, you have a nationwide shit-show. A progressive state can fix that by imposing netneutrality requirements. Just like many states introduce extra anti-telemarketing laws that give consumers protection above and beyond the TCPA.
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.
That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.
People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality. Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.
Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.
- Comment on Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers 6 months ago:
It’s worth noting that the FCC’s “Open” Internet Advisory Committee (#OIAC) tragically gives two seats on the board to:
- Cloudflare
- Comcast
Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed non-Trump administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.