prokopetz:

gacorley:

prokopetz:

The whole net neutrality discussion seems to be focusing on download speeds and access to particular services, but does anybody remember back in 2006 when AOL got caught blocking people from sending or receiving emails that expressed criticism of AOL? There was no sign that it was happening, and the emails would appear to be delivered – AOL’s mail servers would even report a normal “accepted for delivery” status code – but they’d just never show up in the recipient’s inbox. Or how about the incident a year earlier where Telus imposed fake service outages for websites expressing support for the
Telecommunications Workers Union? Again, no indication that any blocking was taking place: just a error page falsely claiming the affected sites were down.

Under the proposed deregulations, this sort of thing would be explicitly permitted, and we know it’s possible because it’s been done. Now consider how much more communication happens via the Internet in 2017 than in 2005/2006. It’s not even email or websites; big chunks of the telephone network now pass through ISP-mediated VOIP channels, and those conversations would likewise be targetable by faked outages.

Like, this isn’t some dystopian sci-fi scenario; we’re talking about horseshit that major ISPs were getting up to on the sly over a decade ago, and are now about to be told can be engaged in without regulatory penalty.

This happened? That’s serious.

By the way, that kind of scenario is how censorship in China works. They don’t throw up a page saying the content is illegal, they just route it in such a way that the packets go around in circles and time out. ISPs could easily start pulling all kinds of tricks to demote things they don’t like – they have the option of not routing it correctly, slowing the bandwidth to a crawl, or just stopping the request and sending back a 404. We need to keep Net Neutrality.

Oh, yeah, it happened. The cited incidents aren’t even the half of it – they’re just a couple of the better known ones.

For example, there was the time that Comcast blocked Boston-area subscribers from accessing their GMail inboxes, and when folks called their support line to complain, they falsely claimed that it was a technical issue on Google’s end and tried to sell them a Comcast email account.

Or the time that Madison River Communications ended up getting fined for their VOIP-metering scheme when it turned out that they were interfering with 911 calls made by users in their service area.

Or the time Verizon started selectively blocking text messages sent by pro-choice advocacy groups, even to recipients who’d explicitly opted into them.

Again, none of this is hypothetical – this isn’t stuff we imagine major telecoms will do in the absence of strong net neutrality protections, but stuff they already have done, and in many cases only stopped due to regulatory pressure at the federal level.