Yes Virginia, ISPs Have Silently Blocked Web Sites

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A recurring theme in editorials about Net Neutrality -- broadly defined as the principle that ISPs may not block or degrade access to sites based on their content or ownership (with exceptions for clearly delineated services like parental controls) -- is that it is a "solution in search of a problem", that ISPs in the free world have never actually blocked legal content on purpose. True, the movement is mostly motivated by statements by some ISPs about what they might do in the future, such as slow down customers' access to sites if the sites haven't paid a fast-lane "toll". But there was also an oft-forgotten episode in 2000 when it was revealed that two backbone providers, AboveNet and TeleGlobe, had been blocking users' access to certain Web sites for over a year -- not due to a configuration error, but by the choice of management within those companies. Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. But I think this incident is more relevant than ever now -- not just because it shows that prolonged violations of Net Neutrality can happen, but because some of the people who organized or supported AboveNet's Web filtering, are people in fairly influential positions today, including the head of the Internet Systems Consortium, the head of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, and the operator of Spamhaus. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?" Read on for the rest of his story.

In the aforementioned instance, AboveNet and TeleGlobe were not selling "parental filters" or other common types of filtered Internet access; the users being blocked from our Web sites were adults paying for what they thought were unfiltered Internet connections. What had happened was that AboveNet and TeleGlobe signed up to block Web sites on the Realtime Blackhole List, a list which was widely (but inaccurately) thought to be a list of "spammers", put out by a group called the Mail Abuse Prevention System. (MAPS and the RBL still exist, but under new management and in a form that bears little resemblance to their late-90's forerunners.) Most ISPs that used the RBL used it to filter only incoming e-mail, but AboveNet went all-out and blocked users from even viewing RBL'ed web sites, presumably because two of MAPS's founders, Paul Vixie and Dave Rand, were on the AboveNet board of directors. And it turned out that the RBL not only included spammers, but also Web sites that were not sending mail at all but were blocked because of their content -- in our case, our ISP got blocked because some other customers were selling mailing list software that MAPS believed could be too easily abused by spammers.

These two distinctions -- (1) the distinction between blocking incoming e-mail from spammers, versus blocking Web sites; and (2) the distinction between blocking traffic due to spam activity, versus blocking sites because of their content -- both go to the heart of what Net Neutrality is, and isn't, about. Net Neutrality is about user preferences -- not meaning that as a buzzword, but as an actual guiding principle to figure out what is and is not covered by the cause. If an ISP filters incoming mail from known spammers, that generally improves the user experience, and is something many users would expect an ISP to do anyway. But if an ISP blocks users from reaching Web sites (even, for the sake of argument, the Web sites of actual spammers), then that's generally counteracting the user's wishes -- if the user didn't want to go there, they wouldn't have typed it in. (After all, I visit spammers' Web sites all the time, usually right before I sue them.) Similarly, if an ISP blocks traffic from sites because of spam or other network abuse, that serves to protect their own users. But if an ISP blocks users from viewing sites because of their content, that's generally not expected by users, unless they've specifically signed up for something like parental controls. The Snowe Net Neutrality amendment proposed last year recognized both of these distinctions, and stated that nothing in the amendment would be interpreted to prohibit spam filtering, parental control services, or measures to protect network security.

The MAPS incident thus shaped most of my opinions about Net Neutrality 6 years before the debate even had a name. When I first found out in August 2000 that our ISP was blacklisted, like most people I believed that the RBL really was a list of spammers; after all the MAPS web page said that the RBL was a list of networks that "originate or relay spam". So I called my ISP screaming at them for being incompetent spam-enablers (the culmination of many frustrating issues with them), and saying that if they really were letting customers send spam, or running an insecure server that spammers were hijacking, I would leave on principle, if the cretins managing our server didn't drop it in the lake first. The ISP owner then told me what happened: that the ISP was not blacklisted for spamming customers, but because of the content of the other sites. (Buried in the list of RBL criteria on MAPS's site was the statement that sites could be blacklisted for providing "spam software", although the criteria did not define how they distinguished between spam software and regular mailing list software, which is how our ISP got caught in the net. And the criteria did not disclose anywhere the most controversial feature of the RBL, which is that if an ISP didn't comply, MAPS would start blacklisting other unrelated sites at the same ISP to put more pressure on them.) I agreed that this seemed to be absurd, and said I wouldn't leave the ISP if they were being blackballed just because of the content of hosted pages.

I don't know exactly what the mail software in question did or where MAPS thought the line should be drawn, but I am a purist about content -- it's a long-standing principle among the Internet security community that if a tool exists which exploits a security hole, you don't try to make the software disappear, you fix the hole. And besides, since MAPS and their supporters wanted to blackball ISPs that hosted spamming software (however you defined that), but the same people had never advocated blackballing ISPs that hosted network break-in tools and other cracking programs, for example, then what were they really saying? That spamming someone more unethical than breaking into their network?

But by far the most common objection to my complaint about AboveNet blocking Web sites was, "Hey, if a private company blocks things, as long as they're being honest to their users about it, who cares?" Well, true, but the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites was not widely known even within the company; when I once called AboveNet feigning ignorance and asking them if they blocked RBL'ed Web sites, the technician who spoke to me said, "No, that wouldn't make any sense." (Well, half right.) Their AUP mentioned "protecting users from spam" but said nothing about blocking Web sites. In fact, other than "family-filtered" ISPs and similar services, I've never heard of any company blocking Web sites that actually did try to make their users aware of it. (On the other hand, even if AboveNet had fully disclosed their filtering, they were still a backbone company selling connectivity mainly to ISPs -- and I think if you sell something wholesale that can only be re-sold to the public by fraudulent means, then you're at least partly complicit in that fraud as well.)

If you're tempted to argue that backbone providers should be allowed to block whatever they want as long as they bury it in their AUP (although AboveNet and TeleGlobe didn't even do that much), just consider: When you access Google from your home computer, have you read the AUP of every network that the packets pass through, to check whether they reserve the right to block or even modify your traffic? Without doing a traceroute, could you even name all the networks that the traffic passes through? Do you really want the burden to be on you to check with all of them every time there's a problem reaching a Web site? Or do you feel like there's an understanding that as long as you pay your bill, they should let you go wherever you want?

Some have argued that if an ISP blocks the user from reaching a Web site, then even if the ISP is defrauding the user, that's still strictly an issue between the user and the ISP. But if a user is trying to reach your Web site, the user is trying to give you something of value: their attention, their eyeballs on your advertisements, sometimes even their money (with the expectation that you will provide them with something in return, of course, like some content worth reading). If the ISP steps in and blocks that, then the ISP has taken something of value that the user was attempting to give to you, and diverted it to serve their own interests. To me that doesn't seem ethically much different from the FedEx driver swiping the chocolates that someone tried to send you for Valentine's Day. Is that just between the sender and FedEx? Or do you have a beef because you didn't get the present that was intended for you, and you had to eat last week's chocolates to cheer up?

The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. But they both boil down to the same thing: not giving end users what they have already paid for. If a user buys Internet access, they almost always buy it with the understanding that if they access a site, the content will download as quickly as their connection allows.

Thus the most common misconception about Net Neutrality is that the proponents are fighting against "capitalism" -- ISPs just charging more for different delivery speeds. But ISPs are already charging users for those delivery lines -- including different tiers for different prices. That's capitalism, and it works, with prices falling all the time in a fairly competitive market. But charging publishers for those higher delivery speeds to the user's house, is really more like double-billing, because the user has already been charged once for the lines that the content is coming over, so the ISP is trying to charge the content publisher again for the same service. Of course, if you charge party A for doing X, and then you try to charge party B for the same instance of doing X, and party B doesn't pay up so you don't do X, you're also breaking your deal with A. Brad Templeton of the EFF stated as much on his blog in 2006:

The pipes start off belonging to the ISPs but they sell them to their customers. The customers are buying their line to the middle, where they meet the line from the other user or site they want to talk to. The problem is generated because the carriers all price the lines at lower than they might have to charge if they were all fully saturated, since most users only make limited, partial use of the lines. When new apps increase the amount a typical user needs, it alters the economics of the ISP. They could deal with that by raising prices and really delivering the service they only pretend to sell, or by charging the other end, and breaking the cost contract. They've rattled sabres about doing the latter.

And I think the same is clearly true if, instead of trying to extract money from the content publisher, the ISP tries to extract something else, like an agreement to shut down certain Web sites before the ISP will let their users view other sites hosted at the same company. You can talk all day about how evil those Web sites are, but the ISP has already sold the user a connection with the implied ability to access them.

Anyway, this all came out in 2000 when a Slashdot article revealed that AboveNet had been blocking Web sites, and AboveNet stopped doing it two hours after the article came out. (TeleGlobe stuck with it for a few more months.) But from the hostility of the reaction, you'd think that we had published cartoons in a Danish newspaper showing Paul Vixie with a bomb in his turban. I got more e-mails than I could count arguing that AboveNet had the right to block whatever Web sites they felt like, regardless of whether the end users knew it was happening. To those people, I'd be sincerely interested in their answer to this question: Does that mean they've have no problem if they found out their ISP was silently blocking sites for political reasons? There is a clear line between following user preferences by blocking spam, and countermanding user preferences by blocking sites because of their content -- and once you've crossed that line, where's the logical stopping point? Seriously, I would have liked to have known how they would answer that, if I could have gotten any meaningful dialog going with them, which most of the time I couldn't. At the time, I'd just spent four years telling people that kids looking at porn was a non-issue, and that by the way if their kids came to my Web site I'd even help them get around their blocking software, and I still got more angry e-mails for disclosing the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites based on their content, than I'd gotten in all the previous four years combined. (A few even accused us of moving into a blacklisted address block on purpose. This was because the actual move happened after the blacklisting was in place, even though I told them all that our ISP had announced the coming move two months before -- repeat, before -- they ever heard from MAPS. Some people were so in love with that "smoking gun" that they didn't believe me; that's their prerogative. But don't take my word for it -- when one supporter wrote to MAPS to ask about un-blocking our site, MAPS officer Kelly Thompson replied:

>Would it be possible to
>selectively unblock peacefire.org (209.211.253.169)?
Technically? Yes, it is. It's a violation of our policy, though, so I can't do so.

I would be willing to help you find other free or reduced cost hosting, however.

It was MAPS's decision, not ours or our ISP's, to have our site blocked. That should settle that once and for all, just as soon as there is peace in the Middle East and a black lesbian in the White House.)

But what do all these people think about Net Neutrality, 6 years later? I tried to track down the influential people who had spoken out supporting AboveNet's blocking of Web sites, or at least their right to block Web sites. My position was, we can agree to disagree on that, but if they really feel that way, why haven't they been speaking out against Net Neutrality? The proposed Snowe amendment was pretty clear:

SEC. 12. INTERNET NEUTRALITY
(a) Duty of Broadband Service Providers- With respect to any broadband service offered to the public, each broadband service provider shall--
(1) not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet.

John Levine, webmaster of Abuse.Net, head of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group, and one of the most vocal critics of Peacefire's campaign against AboveNet's Web filtering, said that he would have opposed the bill but didn't bother because it didn't have much chance of passing. Well, it didn't, but the bill was significant not because of its likelihood of passage, but because it articulated the principles that the Net Neutrality coalition had rallied around, and with the momentum behind the movement, it's likely to achieve at least some of its goals, by legislation or otherwise.

Paul Vixie, Dave Rand, and Steve Linford did not respond to requests for comment on Net Neutrality. But Paul Vixie wrote something very interesting in a May 2006 blog post:

Second, there's network neutrality. In telephone service, the government mandates that all companies providing voice-grade telephony interconnect with eachother at preset rates, thus ensuring that any phone can call any other phone and that new phone companies can enter the field to help ensure competition. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Recently SBC (I mean AT&T, I think, is it Wednesday?) rattled its sabre and said that Google and other content supplying companies should be paying for the use of SBC's backbone to reach SBC's eyeballs. Most of us said, uh, what? "Aren't SBC's own customers paying SBC to carry that traffic?" Some of us even said "I am not an eyeball, I am a person!" But anyway, from time to time these Internet companies shut down interconnects in hopes of creating new cash flows among eachother, and until the government regulates this, we're all at risk of higher prices or lower service with zero notice. Some well meaning democrats are trying to challenge this with "network neutrality" legislation, but this probably isn't their year. Or their decade.

San Francisco has a government, though. And if San Francisco owned and operated its own wireless Internet plant, we could mandate that any Internet company wishing to do business in this city interconnect at fair and reasonable cost to all other Internet companies wishing to do business in this city.

"Until the government regulates this"? "Government mandates"? "Fair and reasonable cost"? Quick, call the anti-socialist intervention squad! How long does it take those San Francisco hippies to suck the new arrivals' brains out anyway? Of course, I agree with everything he said. It's just that if you replace "create new cash flows" with "try to get ISPs to remove content from their servers", this describes exactly what Vixie and AboveNet were doing a few years earlier. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure this didn't escape his sense of irony, so perhaps this confirms something I'd suspected all along, which is that Vixie understood the subtleties of the issue better than most of his cheerleaders, and may be having second thoughts about AboveNet's Web-blocking misadventure. From the beginning, in a 1997 interview with Sun World, he sounded like someone trying to at least keep an open mind:

Concentration of power into a single individual: It's very true that power has corrupted every individual in whom it has ever been concentrated in the history of mankind. I do not feel that I am necessarily above whatever elements of human nature give rise to that. I worry about it. Probably other people worry about it more than I do.

Although, he didn't get to making any such frank statements during the controversy over AboveNet's Web site blocking. (Perhaps MAPS's lawyers were worried that he was a little too unfiltered and advised him not to comment; at the time, the MAPS Web site had a "How to sue MAPS" link on the front page.)

Speaking of which, Anne Mitchell, Director of Legal and Public Affairs for MAPS during the time when AboveNet was blocking Web sites, was the only MAPS adherent from the era that I could find who has since clearly and publicly come out against Net Neutrality. In May 2006 she wrote:

Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money. And if you can't charge those who use the majority of it accordingly, then you are going to have to amortize it across everybody.

So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket.

Because somebody has to pay those bills, and if the law says that the ISPs can't charge the big guys - the big users - differently, it means that they have to charge them the same rate that they charge everyone else. And that means not that their rate will go down, but that everybody else's rate will go up.

And then again in February 2007 in another blog post titled "Towards A Nanny Internet", she wrote, "Network neutrality is the idea that ISPs should be forced to charge everybody the same for their Internet use", grouping it together with proposed anti-bullying and anti-anonymity laws.

Well, points to Anne for being consistent, and for publicly declaring her views in no uncertain terms, which is all I'm asking of the other supporters of AboveNet's website blocking policy. (Although she's coming at it from a different angle this time, "How do we work out who pays for the traffic" rather than "ISPs should be allowed to block whatever they want without telling anybody".) But this is also a textbook example of what I think are the three major fallacies of opposition to Net Neutrality:

First, lumping it together with other examples of unpopular regulation and calling it one more example of Big Government -- an argument also tried in other editorials ("Politicians and public figures alike should realize the absurdity of advocating more red tape to keep the Internet free"). This meme has never really caught on, possibly because groups like the ACLU and the EFF that have traditionally opposed true Internet censorship, have lined up in favor of Net Neutrality. All the proposed "red tape" and "regulation" really says is that if a user attempts to access a Web site over a connection that they've paid for, the ISP may not block or slow down their access, a law which most people would hardly consider tyrannical.

Second, asserting that "Network neutrality is the idea that ISPs should be forced to charge everybody the same for their Internet use." I've never actually heard anyone advocate anything close to that, but a common question among skeptics is why different "tiers" for Internet traffic are really any different from different-tiered pricing for dial-up vs. DSL, or for different levels of Web hosting. The difference is that when users and Web site owners pay for those connections, they are paying for their respective connections to the rest of the Internet. But an ISP charging a Web site owner to carry their traffic the last mile to the user's house, is not charging for a product or service, but really charging a fee not to break a service that they've already agreed to provide to the user.

Which leads to the third misconception: "Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money... So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket." But it's not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. We know that ISP pricing models can already support the total traffic that people consume today, and ISPs do already follow net neutrality principles most of the time, so nobody's costs will "skyrocket" just because a neutrality law passes. If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell" as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels. What ISPs should not do is charge users for implied full-throttle connections, and then turn around to charge publishers for moving bits over those same lines, or block the connection for any other reason.

So, yes, Virginia, blocking of Web sites does happen -- and by "Virginia", I mean FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, who said in a speech in August 2006: "I have to say, thus far, proponents of net neutrality regulation have not come to us to explain where the market is failing or what anticompetitive conduct we should challenge; we are open to hearing from them." This was echoed in an editorial later that month from Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute:

Internet service providers have voluntarily upheld content-neutral practices without the need for government intervention, and consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites... If the loss of net neutrality principles was really a problem, advocates wouldn't need to scare Americans in order to win their support. Using government regulation preemptively to shortchange business partners is a reckless abuse of the public policy process. New laws should be based on facts and reality, not fear and hypothetical situations.

I guess both of those ladies' ISPs must be blocking access to the SaveTheInternet.com Web site, so I e-mailed both of them the coalition's list of examples, and added a note about the AboveNet/TeleGlobe incident as well. No personal response from either of them yet, but I'm sure they just got lost in the shuffle while they were so busy sending out corrections. (On the other hand, I did get a courteous response from Randolph J. May of the Free State Foundation, when I wrote to him about an editorial he penned which also argued that violations have not happened: "It is generally agreed that except for a few isolated and quickly remedied incidents, neither the cable operators nor the telephone companies providing broadband Internet services have blocked, impaired or otherwise restricted subscriber access to the content of unaffiliated entities." He said he hadn't known about the AboveNet/TeleGlobe incident either.)

Another theme in some anti-Net-Neutrality editorials is that existing laws are enough to deal with the problem. In Majoras's speech, she said, "We should not forget that we already have in place an existing law enforcement and regulatory structure." Arrison's echoed that "Numerous federal agencies already have set a basic legal framework in place to preserve fair competition and business practices on the Internet". Well, as Yogi Berra says, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. After I found out AboveNet and TeleGlobe were blocking my Web site, I called about twenty lawyers in the Bellevue phone book, figuring: I wasn't greedy, but surely there would be financial damages for deceiving users and blocking our site, enough to pay a lawyer in return for handling the case? I think about two lawyers called me back, and they both said that even though what the backbone companies were doing clearly looked like fraud, it would take tens of thousands of dollars just to get started, and even if we ever got to court, the judge could call it however they wanted. Whatever laws exist now, they may help the slightly smaller big guy against the bigger big guy, but are not much use to the little or medium-sized guy.

So, any informed debate about Net Neutrality has to include the fact that, yes, some providers have blocked Web sites on purpose, for long periods of time, and no, the free market didn't fix it by itself. Even if something on that scale never happens again, if the free market and the anti-trust laws didn't automatically correct a case where Web sites were being blocked outright, then it's wishful thinking to think that those forces will prevent ISPs from merely slowing down Web access to sites that haven't paid a "toll", as they have made noises about doing. One AboveNet customer, Sam Knutson, said when he found out about the Web site blocking, "This type of behavior on the part of an ISP is reprehensible. I pay for a pipe and don't expect this type of monkey business." Well, I agree that it's reprehensible; whether we should "expect" more of it or not, depends on how much the Net Neutrality movement achieves its goals.

Comments

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Slightly worryingly, the first time I clicked on the link to this story, I got a blank Slashdot page with the message

Nothing to see here. Please move along.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, i have Comcast cable, and it says its unable to connect, it doesn't even timeout, it just refuses to connect!

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing to see here. Please move along.

Damn right :) This is just a repeat of Haselton's whine 5 or 6 years ago:

"Whaaaa, a bunch of spammers are hosting on my server so I got blocked along with them, waaaa, censorship!"
"Hey Bennett, have you triedcalling your ISP and demanding to know what's up with all those spammers on your server?"
"Whaaaa, a bunch of spammers are hosting on my server so I got blocked along with them, waaaa, censorship!"
"Hey Bennet, what did your ISP say?"
"Whaaaa, a bunch of spammers are hosting on my server so I got blocked along with them, waaaa, censorship!"
"Yo Bennet, any chance your ISP is using you as a pawn to keep his spammers going?"
"Whaaaa, a bunch of spammers are hosting on my server so I got blocked along with them, waaaa, censorship!"
"Bennet, why don't you answer the question: Have you spoken to your ISP about this?"
"Whaaaa, a bunch of spammers are hosting on my server so I got blocked along with them, waaaa, censorship!"

The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' status

[rthille]

And thus be liable to be sued for _any_ content they carry.

People expect too much

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a "right" to access anything you want on the web. The ISPs should be free to decide what and what not they are allowed to show you. If you don't like it, change ISPs.

Instead, you all want to freeload, accessing what you want as if the companies owed you the internet or something.

Re:People expect too much

[voice_of_all_reason]

True, up until the point where they get in with the State

State says: "We won't prosecute you for technically transmissing pirated movies, illegal pornography, and bomb recipies, because we realize the internet is a good thing. If someone finds these things, just get rid of them best you can."

Now the government is involved in the relationship, and allowing ISPs to restrict speech (by refusing to carry it) is essentially government-approved censorship. That is No.

Re:People expect too much

[lostatredrock]

Except the change ISPs argument holds no water. My entire state has one choice for good broadband, the local cable company that's it. Hopefully that will be changing soon, but for the time being I have no other options besides giving up and switching to dial-up.

The argument that capitalism will naturally correct any injustices the providers for upon users has to concede that for the vast majority of users in the United States there is no vibrant broadband market. This situation can change, but the cost implementing a high speed network over a huge geographic area is high and the only people who look like they are expanding this market are the ones already in it.

Re:People expect too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Satellite.

It even holds the promise (eventually) of being international.

Although I'm not sure a Chinese satellite Internet service would be much of an improvement.

AC

Re:People expect too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Satellite has lag issues that can't be overcome, period.

Re:People expect too much

[chaoticgeek]

Except that when I live in the middle of nowhere and there is only dial up and cable if I want broadband I have to choose the one and only company out here. Plus the fact that from the article it appears as if the companies did not come out and say "Hey all these sites are blocked." Now if an ISP wants block content based on the fact that it is illegal or it is spam I can kinda see why that would be nice. But they should have to come out and tell you everything they are blocking so I can argue about it if something on that list is not what it appears to be. Espically the spam part because there are some sites that are considered spam and people may still use them. Like the freaking weather bug... I hate that thing but my grandparents and my parents have to have it for some reason... Many people would consider it spyware but not some... Its a very touchy subject, but when I drop pay that bill I should also be getting what they promised to me. If they say I will have 2megs up and down then I should have that and when I get throttled back because I go over one meg I will complain because they told me two megs not one and I should be charged less for that. Now if they throttle me because I go over two so that I only use two megs then that is fine.

Re:People expect too much

[skoaldipper]

Satellite has lag issues that can't be overcome, period.

Vint Cerf is working on it. Oh wait, you meant...

Re:People expect too much

[Anonymous Coward]

Then move to a real state.

Re:People expect too much

[Rakarra]

Satellite is not a good replacement. The latency is so bad it shouldn't be considered broadband.

Re:People expect too much

[Deadplant]

What the hell are you talking about? Who said anything about rights? When I cut a cheque I demand the service that was advertised. don't you? If not, then I think you are going to have a lot of trouble in this capitalist world.

as if the companies owed you the internet or something. Umm.... perhaps you haven't heard of this thing called "commerce"... here's how it works: one person/entity give another person/entity a quantity of money(you know about money right?) and in exchange the other person/entity gives the first person/entity a product or service. You give them "money" then they "owe" you a product or service.

Irony?

[JhohannaVH]

Did I sense just a tad bit of Irony there? :)

Protected free speech is going the way of the goony bird... for years and years, I've been saying that the Internet would continue to protect that free speech and media, but it looks like even that is going away. :(

Orwell only scratched the surface, methinks.

Re:Irony?

[apathy maybe]

Orwell didn't know about the Internet (and probably not about computers (in the modern sense)).

And not only that, the difference is that Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector, though I am sure that he would have been against any gains in power by corporations. He was, after all, a socialist.

Re:Irony?

[JhohannaVH]

Oh, I know. But if we think that the Government can't/won't pull these stunts, we're rather blind sheep. Well, I'm not, but... the vast majority out there are.

Re:Irony?

[iminplaya]

And not only that, the difference is that Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector...

It never occurred to me that there was a difference.

Re:Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector...

Seeing how our government has become a de facto subsidiary of the corporate sector, I'm not sure I see the difference.

Re:Irony?

[JhohannaVH]

There isn't anymore, that's for damn sure. One look at SOX will tell you that! :D

Re:Irony?

[JensenDied]

well with all of that lobbying, kickbacks, and things of those nature, they both are extensions of the other.

Re:Irony?

[rucs_hack]

Has there ever been a time when total free speech has existed in America? I am thinking of all members of the population here, not just the whites.

The thought occurs that it has not ever covered the entire population, just bits of it.

Re:Irony?

[DragonWriter]

And not only that, the difference is that Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector,

A "corporation" is an entity with no natural existence created by and granted special privileges through law (i.e., by the government). The myth that the "corporate sector" is somehow not a product of government but simply free private individuals doing their own thing shows a deep misunderstanding of what a corporation fundamentally is.

Re:Irony?

[bberens]

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. ~P.J. O'Rourke

Re:Irony?

[MPAB]

The corporate sector will bribe and lobby the government as long as the government has the power to enact laws that distort the reality. The best way to get rid of competence is to declare it illegal, and when we call for more power to the government we just give it a bigger power that can be bought off by a big enough business.

Re:Irony?

[greenbird]

Oh, I know. But if we think that the Government can't/won't pull these stunts, we're rather blind sheep. Well, I'm not, but... the vast majority out there are.

They already are in collusion with the corporations. Look at the Justice Department audit of the FBI access to communications.

Re:Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when government is entangled in the "free" market.

The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector, and the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector.

-- Henry Hazlitt

When you combine the two, you get corporatism, not capitalism.

Re:Irony?

[JoGlo]

And not only that, the difference is that Orwell was warning against Government. This is the corporate sector, though I am sure that he would have been against any gains in power by corporations. He was, after all, a socialist.

Marx (with his economist hat on) always contended that corporate power would over time concentrate into fewer and fewer groups, which would grow in size until the state was dominated by the corporate entities, until they eventually supplanted the political entities entirely. The people who tried to adopt his theories to backward peasant nations sure got it wrong, but it sure looks to me like he was right about this, and this is but one of the manifestations of that phenomenon..

Re:Irony?

[iminplaya]

Very well put. And seeing that government is supposed to derive its power from us, it is, in fact, we who give the corporations their power also, and we DO have the power to revoke their very existence. That we suffer any misfortunes at the hands of these people is our own cross to bear.

I like the part on peacefire...

[rthille]

Where the candidate in the 2000 election was infavor of blocking software until they found out it blocked _their_ site.

Are they just stupid or what?

Re:I like the part on peacefire...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for using the correct tense, "blocked". Unlike a certain headline, which seems to inidicate that RIGHT NOW some ISPs in Virginia are ACTIVELY BLOCKING certain websites.

This is a -followup- to news for nerds from SIX YEARS AGO. It is a very relevant tie-in to the Net Neutrality debate, and therefore stuff that matters.

To lampoon two bad Slashtrends at once: Is this kind of sensational headline really necessary?

Re:I like the part on peacefire...

[Anonymous Coward]

I missed the part where this is happening in Virginia. Bennett Hasselton is in Washington. Perhaps you didn't notice that the comma is after "Virginia."

It is ridiculous

[paladinwannabe2]

Seriously, the way people complain about being blocked or having their bandwidth thottled, you'd think they were paying money for their internet connection or something.

Re:It is ridiculous

[vierpsyche]

I know for sure that the cable company in MA where I live throttles connections between users on the same cable system. Users can't have full bandwidth if they share the same cable provider. This is justified by the cable company as ensuring the bandwidth for the many. Of course, if I pay more then this throttling goes away. Just corporate American squeezing everything they can from the consumer. They give you a nice smile as the knife is placed strategically in your back.

Huh? How does Virginia factor into this?

[g051051]

Are AboveNet and TeleGlobe headquartered in Virginia? Because there doesn't seem to be any mention of Virigina in the article other than in passing, and not even in reference to the state or it's ISPs.

So Which Is It?

[Nom du Keyboard]

So which is it. An article of general interest, or a rant because some ISP doesn't like your web-site? While I believe in net neutrality in the pure sense, and not the sense when used at the title of a bill that attempts just the opposite, I also like truth in labeling and the use of proper [rant]...[/rant] tags.

Re:So Which Is It?

[discHead]

"So which is it. An article of general interest, or a rant because some ISP doesn't like your web-site?"

I take it this is your first encounter with Bennett's oeuvre.

500 word summary, courtesy of Microsoft Word

[Animats]

Put all that blithering into Microsoft Word 97, clicked on Tools->AutoSummarize, and got this 500 word summary:

Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine. Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?"

In the aforementioned instance, AboveNet and TeleGlobe were not selling "parental filters" or other common types of filtered Internet access; the users being blocked from our Web sites were adults paying for what they thought were unfiltered Internet connections. If an ISP filters incoming mail from known spammers, that generally improves the user experience, and is something many users would expect an ISP to do anyway. Similarly, if an ISP blocks traffic from sites because of spam or other network abuse, that serves to protect their own users. But if an ISP blocks users from viewing sites because of their content, that's generally not expected by users, unless they've specifically signed up for something like a parental controls. Well, true, but the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites was not widely known even within the company; when I once called AboveNet feigning ignorance and asking them if they blocked RBL'ed Web sites, the technician who spoke to me said, "No, that wouldn't make any sense." Some have argued that if an ISP blocks the user from reaching a Web site, then even if the ISP is defrauding the user, that's still strictly an issue between the user and the ISP. The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. If a user buys Internet access, they almost always buy it with the understanding that if they access a site, the content will download as quickly as their connection allows.

There is a clear line between following user preferences by blocking spam, and countermanding user preferences by blocking sites because of their content -- and once you've crossed that line, where's the logical stopping point? It was MAPS's decision, not ours or our ISP's, to have our site blocked. I tried to track down the influential people who had spoken out supporting AboveNet's blocking of Web sites, or at least their right to block Web sites. INTERNET NEUTRALITY

Second, there's network neutrality. In Internet service, the government mandates nothing. Although, he didn't get to making any such frank statements during the controversy over AboveNet's Web site blocking. Internet service providers have voluntarily upheld content-neutral practices without the need for government intervention, and consumers would never stand for blocked Web sites...

Content is content, regardless of protocol

[corbettw]

If it's proper for an ISP to block email that has questionable or unwanted content (eg, spam), why is it not proper for that same ISP to block Websites that also have questionable or unwanted content (eg, phishing sites)? Just because AboveNet and TeleGlobe, or more accurately MAPS, went overboard and blacklisted innocent sites, doesn't mean the principle is invalid.

The real issue here isn't that ISPs were blocking access to Websites, it's that the reputation service they were using to judge which sites should be blocked used questionable methods to determine eligibility for blocking. Given my experience with Spamhaus in fighting spam, I would have no problem if my ISP used them to block access to possible phishing or scam sites, in addition to combating spam.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[shabble]

If it's proper for an ISP to block email that has questionable or unwanted content (eg, spam), why is it not proper for that same ISP to block Websites that also have questionable or unwanted content

Because in the former, the initial requests/data originate from sources outside their control, and in the latter it is their own users instigating the requests.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[CXI]

If it's proper for an ISP to block email that has questionable or unwanted content (eg, spam), why is it not proper for that same ISP to block Websites that also have questionable or unwanted content (eg, phishing sites)?

If those website were spewing http requests at my browser without having been asked to do so, your comment would make sense. However that's not how it works. Website do not take up my bandwidth, storage, resources or time without an explicit request on my part for a reply. It is an entirely different situation. If you moved this into the area of spam sites that flood your screen with unrequested popups, then you might have a point. For the majority of websites, however, that does not apply.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[LoverOfJoy]

Most email providers just put the spam in a separate junk folder, allowing the user to decide whether to delete it all or check first to make sure something important accidentally got placed there. I wouldn't have a problem with ISPs doing something similar with websites that may be scams/phishing. If some warning popped up that required me to click to continue (along with saving my choice for the future) I might consider it a useful feature depending on how accurate it was at spotting scams/phishing.

I would not like the ISP to just block a site outright with little to no way of getting around it. I wouldn't like my junk mail deleted automatically either.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue here, which the author of the post clearly stated, is one of USER CHOICE. It is not your choice to receive spam emails, and so the ISP can be perfectly justified in blocking their users from receiving spam emails. But if I choose to go to www.IAmAGiganticSpammer.com the ISP has no right to block my access to that site. Perhaps, as the author of the original post points out, I am going to that site for a legitimate reason.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[LoverOfJoy]

I should add that I have an option of choosing an email provider that doesn't block any emails or put them in junk folders. In some areas there isn't really many/any options for ISPs.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[manifoldronin]

If it's proper for an ISP to block email that has questionable or unwanted content (eg, spam), why is it not proper for that same ISP to block Websites that also have questionable or unwanted content (eg, phishing sites)?

Because email and web site are two entirely different animals as far as the accessing paradigm is concerned? It's proper for an ISP to block email spams because they consume the ISP's resources and they come from someone who didn't pay for the consumption and those who paid to consume don't have a chance to say they don't want it.

On the other hand, the content of a web site cannot flow through an ISP's network without a paying customer having chosen so consciously.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[corbettw]

If those website were spewing http requests at my browser without having been asked to do so, your comment would make sense.

So you think it would be wrong for an ISP to block phishing sites that are designed to look like, say, Bank of America and dupe unsuspecting customers into disclosing account information? I'm not saying ISPs should be saddled with an affirmative duty to block those sites, but if they chose to I can't see any reasonable person complaining about it.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[morsdeus]

The problem with this is one of explicit user consent. Email is sent to your mailserver and shows up in your account without your foreknowledge of what you're getting; it's an essential feature of any message-based communication service.

Websites, on the other hand, must be deliberately navigated to with some degree of foreknowledge of where you're going. There's a fundamental discontinuity between blocking packets the user did not solicit and will not want in his or her inbox, and preventing a user from navigating to a site as they freely and knowingly choose, using a navigation service they pay you to provide full, unfiltered access to.

Spammers don't pay you to give them access to someone else's server; customers do.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[DRJlaw]

I would have no problem if my ISP used them to block access to possible phishing or scam sites, in addition to combating spam.

Nice for you. I would have a problem if my ISP used them to block access to a site that I wanted to reach, including phishing or scam sites, in addition to combating spam. Why are you so willing to throw my expectation that I can browse a site that I explicitly want to browse under the proverbial bus?

If it's proper for an ISP to block email that has questionable or unwanted content (eg, spam), why is it not proper for that same ISP to block Websites that also have questionable or unwanted content (eg, phishing sites)?

Presumptively, the former is content that I did not request. Presumptively, the latter is content that I did request. Are you happy when email that you're expecting to receive is silently sent to /dev/null as a false positive by a spam filter that you do not control?

Just because AboveNet and TeleGlobe, or more accurately MAPS, went overboard and blacklisted innocent sites, doesn't mean the principle is invalid.

True. It is invalid because of a failure of imagination. I may have a legitimate need to view a scam site. I may represent a client who was scammed by the site and want to gather evidence on their behalf for a criminal complaint. I may be hired by someone co-hosted on the same server to prepare and file a civil complaint. Your problem can be solved with software installed on your computer. My problem cannot be solved by permitting content-based blocking of actively sought content that is controlled by others. Others may have other legitimate needs. The practice is not valid simply because it does not affect your limited use of the resource.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Phishing is an illegal activity. No one is saying not to block off unlawful web sites. Likewise, no one is saying to not block kiddie porn. What people are saying is, don't block all the websites hosted by a company that doesn't even have spammers as customers, but that sells mailing list software that could be abused by spammers. Likewise, if people are selling illegal drugs from a website, block them. But someone who sells grow lamps from a website should not cause everyone from the hosting company to be blocked, even though grow lamps could be used to grow illegal as well as legal plants.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[corbettw]

Go back and read my original comment, you're basically saying the same thing I already did.

I swear, Slashdot would be a lot more interesting if the reading comprehension of most of its users was just a tad higher than it is.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[Thuktun]

You appear to be suggesting that the MAPS RBL used "questionable methods" in this case, and that Spamhaus should be looked to as a model of how it should be done.

In that case, you might find this post interesting. It's from Steve Linford, founder of Spamhaus, in defense of MAPS to Bennett Haselton of Peacefire.org:

Peacefire.org is posting "MAPS are blocking us" press releases
deliberately distorting facts to suit your own agenda. The prime fact
you ignore is that Media3 could have placed your www.peacefire.org
site in any of their many netblocks, but in August they chose to put
you in the middle of a class C containing notorious spam gangs whose
many IPs were _already_ on the MAPS RBL, and Joe Hayes at Media3 had
been told, by MAPS, in June, _two months_ before they put you in that
block that the whole class C would be blackholed. Do you not even
think Media3 had a duty to tell you that the block they were going to
put you in was about to be placed on the RBL? If they had told you,
would you have agreed or even volunteered to be placed in there
knowing you'd be blackholed by 45% of the Internet? The real issue here, from their perspective, is an ISP trying to use one of their vocal, high-reputation customers as a lever to dislodge blackhole listings against some of their low-reputation customers.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[Fujisawa Sensei]

I do think it's wrong for the ISP to block phishing sites. That's not what I'm paying them for; I'm paying them to connect me to the Internet. Alert the offending system's ISP? Yes. But for them to remain a common carrier, they should be required to allow me to look and browse any phishing site I want to.

If you want an ISP to nanny you that should be an additional service, possibly a different corporate entity. And the ISP providing the nanny service would then not be a common carrier.

As for people typing information into a phishing site: never type your information into a site that you receive via the email.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[zobier]

What about if, as a joke, someone created a web page that never ends -- a new joke page to trick your friends into clicking on over to -- yes, you asked for it, but you got more than you bargained for.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[zobier]

Yeah, sorry. I skipped over the bit that said

spam sites that flood your screen with unrequested popups

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[nobuddy]

Also, they are an organization dedicated to spam control. It is not their place nor goal to filter everything. It is a matter of focus. You don;t expect an ambulance to show up and put out your fire.... Injury and fire are both things that need attention, but you focus on one or the other and let the others handle the leftover.

Re:Content is content, regardless of protocol

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Actually it would be more correct to suggest that I agree with your strawman, but I had to point out that it was a strawman, since I read the article. "I swear, slashdot would be more interesting, if I actually read the article." Blocking illegal sites really has nothing to do with the blocking as refered to in the article.

Re:Translation...

[jamie]

Did you read as far as the 5th word in the title?

Blocking websites is what is under discussion here. Not spam.

Can you explain how a web host can abuse your network's resources by quietly sitting around until a HTTP request is sent to it, and then responding with a webpage?

Re:Translation...

[shabble]

Translation: MAPS put a persistent spammer's machines in the RBL. AboveNet and Teleglobe black-hole things in the RBL at the router level. Spammer doesn't like this.

I got the impression, FTA, that MAPS put a site that provided "spamware" (whatever that is - mailing list softwarre?) on the RBL list, and Abovenet were blocking user access to websites matching the RBL.

This had nothing to do with blocking incoming mail from those IP's, but silently blocking user's outgoing requests to those IP's - something totally different.

OMG, Wall of Text!

[Anonymous Coward]

Executive summary, please.

Re:OMG, Wall of Text!

[gfreeman]

Censorship = bad.
Freedom = good.
Slashdot article = [x] Out of date, [x] Dupe, [ ] Slashvertisement, [x] FUD

Re:Huh? How does Virginia factor into this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are AboveNet and TeleGlobe headquartered in Virginia? Because there doesn't seem to be any mention of Virigina in the article other than in passing, and not even in reference to the state or it's ISPs.

TFA: So, yes, Virginia, blocking of Web sites does happen -- and by "Virginia", I mean FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, who said in a speech in August 2006...

Well, we know Taco doesn't have very good reading comprehension skills, but this is just sad...

Re:Translation...

[nagora]

Translation: MAPS put a persistent spammer's machines in the RBL. AboveNet and Teleglobe black-hole things in the RBL at the router level. Spammer doesn't like this.

Okay, I give in. I've read the article twice and I can't see what part you are referring to. Please explain.

TWW

Please quit abusing 'beg the question'

[Anonymous Coward]

Look it up.

Re:Please quit abusing 'beg the question'

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should look it up. He is using it correctly:

Merriam-Webster:

- beg the question
1 : to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled
2 : to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response ("the quarterback's injury begs the question of who will start in his place")

Some people believe the second meaning should not exist, even though it makes far more sense, is more commonly used, and adds to the language -- it has meaning beyond "raises the question". If you search Google for the phrase, you only see pages using the second meaning and pages complaining about the second meaning; you rarely see anyone using the first meaning outside of a conversation about the phrase itself.

Re:Translation...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

MAPS put a persistent spammer's machines in the RBL. AboveNet and Teleglobe black-hole things in the RBL at the router level. Spammer doesn't like this.

If by "spammer" you mean "Website operator who runs a Web site that sells software including e-mail software that could be abused to send spam.

Network neutrality means ISPs aren't allowed to filter based on the source or destination of the traffic. The filter here isn't based on source or destination, just on volume.

This is incorrect. They were blocking a list of source/destination addresses, not just any IP that sent too much data. Also, they were blocking particular sites that were not sending e-mail at all, just offering particular software for sale that the list maintainers did not like. Net neutrality certainly would make that illegal.

Analogy: UPS charges everyone the same rates and takes anyone's packages, but they won't take any packages weighing more than 1000lbs. When the spammer shows up with a 10,000lb package and UPS refuses it, they aren't refusing it because it's from the spammer, they're refusing it because it's over-weight.

Your analogy is wrong though. They aren't stopping this package because it weighs 10,000lb. It is only 2lbs and contains marketing brochures for a crate company. They are stopping it because they have a list of people and this person happens to sell large crates that could be used to try to ship large items.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[ajs]

Here's the problem: this article is misleading enough that it doesn't do justice to that point AT ALL. The article SEEMS to be about Net neutrality, but is instead a piece that essentially covers the history of RBLs, which have moved from a model of maximum-pain to a model of maximum-gain. That is, they've moved away from trying to cause pain to large blocks of the Net (which turns away users of the service, and defeats the point), to a model such as Spamhaus's where sites are filtered based on a) being a spam source b) being identified as a highly probable spam source (e.g. zombied PCs, open proxies, etc.) or c) being identified as a service which chronically abuses spamming as a marketing technique (e.g. servers whose Web services are commonly and often exclusively advertised in spam).

The attempt to conflate filtering traffic based on a desire for increased revenue and filtering traffic as a direct result of abuse is absurd. One is a valuable service to the customer. One is a self-serving abuse of the customer.

"Begging" the question?

[asninn]

Which begs the question: If they really believe that backbone companies have the right to silently block Web sites, are some of them headed for a rift with Net Neutrality supporters?

Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".

Also, the headline ("Virginia ISPs silently blocking websites") is so misleading I'm really having trouble applying Hanlon's razor here - either CmdrTaco needs to learn how to read (i.e., do more than just glance over the first paragraph in an attempt to find certain trigger words that'd likely get an emotional response from the Slashdot crowd), or he needs to develop some ethics of his own. This site is not supposed to be more than a tech-oriented, (mostly) liberal version of FOX "news", after all (or at least that's what I think).

(And the fact that it's the site's head honcho who posted this story with this headline instead of one of his subordinate drones just makes it even sadder.)

Re:"Begging" the question?

[lahvak]

Maybe it wasn't exactly CmdrTaco's fault. The piece is so badly written that it's almost unreadable. Aforementioned my ass! I wouldn't blame CmdrTaco for using totally misleading headline, I blame him for simply posting this crap at all!

Re:"Begging" the question?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it misleading?

Parent should be modded down as troll.

Re:"Begging" the question?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it misleading?

If you really need to ask, you haven't even bothered trying to read the article. This whole thing has nothing to do with Virginia. The two ISPs mentioned are located in New York and the Bahamas, respectively. What's even worse is that dipshit Taco still hasn't corrected this after several hours.

Re:"Begging" the question?

[ZombieSquirrel]

Please, do look up the difference between "nitpick" and "quibble".

Re:"Begging" the question?

[Experiment 626]

Please, do look up the difference between "begging the question" and "raising a/the question".

Okay, I did:

- beg the question
1 : to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled
2 : to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response

(source: Merriam Webster)

While the former definition, used in logical arguments, is regarded as more correct in an academic context, the raise-the-question definition "has nevertheless become very common", as Wikipedia puts it.

Words and expressions take on new meanings as people use them in different ways. Your post is a bit like the "hacker vs. cracker" pedant, the "Linux means a kernel when speaking of the OS you must say GNU/Linux" argument, and so on.

What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Nom du Keyboard]

The poster seems to have a misunderstanding of the concept of Free Speech. Free Speech means you're allowed to say what you want -- with minor limitations regarding libel and shouting "Fire" in inappropriate places -- without fear of punishment. It does not mean that others are requried to carry your speech regardless. Looks to me like they're telling your ISP to clean up its act and get off the list. If you've got a bad ISP you should move to a new one who doesn't offend Internet society so badly. That's the free market. Instead you complain and demand everything be made right by your standards, instead of anyone else's. Typical liberal clap-trap. If you think there's a demand for a better form of ISP that doesn't do all these terrible things, why don't you go out and start one yourself?

Oh, wait. That would be real work.

Oh, btw, preventing users from researching spammers and their resources is in both the ISP's, and the Internet's best interests. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why.

Lastly, anyone who wants to visit your site that badly is likely going through a proxy, or using ToR already anyway.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[db32]

s/spammers/democracy. Welcome to China. This is the same thing as that horrid "if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about comrade" mentality these days. Yes...we can pretty much all agree spammers are bad, that kiddie porn is wrong, that goatse shouldn't be allowed to exist, however, once you establish that it is ok to block these things at a high level without notice it just becomes a matter of determining what is 'offensive' enough to make the list. Well to China democracy is rather offensive. To the Bush crew pretty much everything that isn't in line with their fear the boogeyman crap is offensive. To the religious right wing evolution is offensive. To the left wing guns are offensive. We have already established that its ok to block things that some arbitrary group has decided 'would be better for everyone', now you just have to trust that that group will never decide certain things are offensive.

One day lecturing about the constitution could be considered insighting revolts and off ya go, all your information blocked from the world as you rot in a dark cell.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Guuge]

The entire lengthy submission doesn't mention "free speech" even once. Maybe you should at least read it before you critique.

Oh, wait. That would be real work.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Random BedHead Ed]

If you've got a bad ISP you should move to a new one who doesn't offend Internet society so badly. That's the free market.

You seem to have reached into your libertarian box for some boilerplate text, found something that doesn't apply well to this article and tossed it into a comment. Congratulations. While I'd agree that the markets are amazing things, they are not as infallible as some might delude themselves to believe. Most free market arguments break down with very little scrutiny, as yours does. How well regulation or deregulation works really depends on the industry and the circumstances.

In this case the market for Internet service isn't free. In most areas there is little competition, often only one broadband choice. Of course I'm talking about the market in the United States, where a lack of competition has prevented the sorts of better ISP services that exist in other countries - like in Great Britain, where I have the choice of a few in my area. Even where there is some limited competition in the US, a problem like the one the poster describes requires a technically savvy person to identify it, so the average person won't migrate to a second ISP even if there is one, and given the lack of competition it is likely enough that any alternative ISP will behave in the same way. Unfortunately regulation is the only thing that will prevent this.

I know what you're going to say. Regulation is wrong, and will stifle the industry. Well, other countries regulate their ISPs successfully, yet still have better ones than the US does, as well as better coverage. Go figure.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. It is not "free speech" which would require these companies to carry your speech. It is their desire to maintain the status of being a common carrier that requires it. By exercising their right not to have to pass along your free speech, they would also have to forfeit the benefits that being a common carrier provides.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Nom du Keyboard]

The entire lengthy submission doesn't mention "free speech" even once. Maybe you should at least read it before you critique.

The Poster is complaining that his website is being blocked because of its contents and as a result people with Internet connections are unable to receive his message. If you are incapable of understanding a Free Speech complaint that doesn't actually include the words "Free Speech" as a clue to the clueless, you should go back and sue whatever high school, college, and/or university graduated you.

And, btw, I did read the article, as I assume did you. What I'm wondering now is if you actually understood it?

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Nom du Keyboard]

You seem to have reached into your libertarian box for some boilerplate text, found something that doesn't apply well to this article and tossed it into a comment...In this case the market for Internet service isn't free.

You clearly did not understand what I was telling the poster, but prattled on as though you had. I was telling the poster that he might want to change the site hosting his webpage to an ISP not on the RBL. This would make his current hosting ISP more responsive to cleaning up some of the scum they're allowing on their system. This has nothing to do with your limited choice of at-home broadband providers, since you can host your web-site with providers all around the world, independent of who your own broadband provider is at the moment.

Yes, this has been another failure to communicate!

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've got a bad ISP you should move to a new one who doesn't offend Internet society so badly.

I'm confused.

Re:What we have is a failure to communicate here

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Even worse, they are complaining that they were being blocked because someone else using the same host sells megaphones, which could be used to yell "fire" in a theater.

Re:Huh? How does Virginia factor into this?

[Zephyros]

Does this help refresh your memory?

In soviet America...

[Anonymous Coward]

...people get warm fuzzy feelings by looking down on China.

Ye Gawds!

[rueger]

He had me right up until "But there was also an oft-forgotten episode in 2000 ... Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine [CC].

Ok, when your argument begins with an 7 year old gripe about actions that were directed at you, any suggestion of objectivity goes right out the door.

Really, this is blog fodder, not something that should be posted unedited on the Slashdot front page.

Re:Ye Gawds!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Ok, when your argument begins with an 7 year old gripe about actions that were directed at you, any suggestion of objectivity goes right out the door.

You don't have to be objective to be correct or even to present a useful example as to why some change is needed.

Re:Ye Gawds!

[arivanov]

Well...
Net neutrality is really a 7+ years old gripe.
A vastly different gripe.
In fact it is 9+ year old gripe.

Prior to the dot bomb boom providers commonly charged and offered different rates/SLAs/etc based on traffic source/destination especially outside the US. Essentially the Net was NOT neutral. In fact it still is not neutral in many places outside the US. The dot bomb replaced this mostly realistic economic model with a whole lot rabid dreams. The differential charging, usage charging and per-destination SLA concepts went away due to marketing pressures to be replaced by various versions of "All you can eat". As a result providers currently operate on a cost and charging model which is not anchored in reality.

Traffic is not created equal and it does not cost the same amount of money to deliver it to next door, to a node in the same geographical area and to a node across the globe. From there there will be a strong economical pressure for the net return to its initial non-neutral state. It was not created neutral in the first place, it is not neutral in most of the world and it will not be neutral even in the US sooner or later.

Re:Ye Gawds!

[MobyDisk]

1.

Ok, when your argument begins with an 7 year old gripe about actions that were directed at you, any suggestion of objectivity goes right out the door. Find, start with that bias. The author admitted it, so it is quite fair of you to take that into account. But the arguments that follow provide clear examples, links to relevant research and articles, and clear non-emotional arguments. The author earned that objectivity back IMHO.

2.

Really, this is blog fodder, not something that should be posted unedited on the Slashdot front page. Yes, it is blog fodder, but Slashdot is a news/blog aggregator. I found this insightful and good information for the next time a Net Neutrality discussion begins.

On a related note, I find it often unfair that someone's arguments are hand-waved away because they are somehow involved. When you do that, you throw away the arguments of the most experienced people on the subject. Of course they are involved, or they wouldn't know so much about it and have an opinion.

Re:Ye Gawds!

[kindbud]

Really, this is blog fodder, not something that should be posted unedited on the Slashdot front page.

LOL!1!!!111one!!!eleven

Re:Translation...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Okay, I give in. I've read the article twice and I can't see what part you are referring to. Please explain.

You've had time to read this twice already?!?!?!

Re:Huh? How does Virginia factor into this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we get that. But Taco has taken that and turned it on its head to say that this is actively happening in the state of Virginia, which is flat-out wrong. This is precisely the type of thing that EDITORS remove from writing, not add in.

No, just learning

[paladinwannabe2]

People believe all sorts of stupid things, but most people will learn from their mistakes once it starts hurting them. For instance, blocking software that prevents kids from accessing drug sites, hate sites, and sex sites is good, right?

For people who don't understand technology, it's not obvious that it's hard (for software) to tell the difference between a sex chat site and a breast cancer awareness site, a drug-awareness site and a drug dealer's site, and the KKK's speech with a history of the civil war. Not to mention that something like 'hate speech' is almost entirely subjective, and almost always ends up blocking all sorts of views.

You shouldn't be making fun of the politician, he made a mistake, and is learning from his error. He understands technology and censorship better than he used to, and is now on our side of the fence. If only more people in the position to make laws were hurt by them more often.

Re:No, just learning

[rthille]

Silly me, I sort of figured that one should educate themselves on a subject _before_ they take a stance on it.

Re:No, just learning

[skoaldipper]

Apply that same philosophy to even the discipline of Software Engineering - no matter how well we design or plan, errors and bugs mysteriously have a habit of making fools of ourselves. Should politicians cast stones at us too?

Re:No, just learning

[civilizedINTENSITY]

It was funny when "drug site" blocking software blocked the DEA's site, though. Kinda makes you wonder WTF? If it is illegal content, that is one thing. The trouble starts when people want to block legal content "for the good" of people trying to reach said legal content.

Re:No, just learning

[Kadin2048]

True, but a software engineer is judged, in many cases, on the quality of the software that s/he produces, and how many bugs it has.

If I were to churn something out that was terribly flawed, completely broken, and was completely a result of my failure to take a step back and rationally analyze the situation, I'd probably be a pretty shitty software engineer. Likewise, I don't think it's unfair to lambast a politician -- whose job it is, after all, to make good laws -- for doing something similar.

If you write crap software that has to be totally rewritten later, you're probably not a good software engineer. If you support dumb laws or stances that force you to utterly contradict yourself later, you're probably not a good politician.

But I'm glad the guy saw the light eventually. I guess that still makes him better than some.

Re:500 word summary, MOD PARENT UP +2 AS FOLLOWS

[Nom du Keyboard]

Mod parent up:
CONCISE +1
PITHY +1.

Re:Translation...

[leviramsey]

You either do not know what you're talking about or you're a demagogue deliberately distorting things.

Given your UID, you were around /. in the autumn of '00 when this was a hot story. I'll place my bets on the latter.

The filter here isn't based on source or destination, just on volume.

The MAPS RBL, as used by AboveNet and Teleglobe was implemented at the IP routing level. Any packets to networks listed on the RBL, regardless of protocol, were blackholed, based on the source/destination IP address.

Analogy: UPS charges everyone the same rates and takes anyone's packages, but they won't take any packages weighing more than 1000lbs. When the spammer shows up with a 10,000lb package and UPS refuses it, they aren't refusing it because it's from the spammer, they're refusing it because it's over-weight.

That analogy has nothing to do with the AboveNet/Teleglobe affair. Nothing whatsoever.

Here's the analogy: due to a plethora of overweight packages from a ZIP/post-code (or whole city, or a whole county, or a whole state/province, or a whole country, or a whole continent... a netblock could be anything from a /31 to a /1), UPS elects to incinerate any packages sent from or to that ZIP/post-code, etc.

Hear! Hear!

[winkydink]

Malicious content on the internet has grown exponentially since criminals figured out how to make money using the internet.

There's a line here. Most people would say that ISP's blocking spam is a good thing. OK, what about blocking access to web sites that contain known malicious code? How about known phishing sites, should these be blocked? Or botnet C&C's?

Again, since most people will accept that some line exists over what should and should not be blocked, then the argument comes down to where to draw that line. Short of legislation regulating where the line is drawn (we all know how well that's worked... not), people will argue, some quite vocally, over where to draw that line (actually they will do it even it it is legislated). Some will say it's not enough, some will say too much, some will say it's just right or not care.

It sounds like the author has a serious axe to grind and I'm a little disappointed he was given the space to do it here. When the author uses a large forum like Slashdot, the author should be factual, (e.g., Paul Vixie was never on the Abovenet Board of Directors. He was in senior management, but that's an important distinction. Research it if you wish).

When I see misrepresentations that I know about, then it makes me wonder how much else is being misrepresented in the article.

Mine Has Done It

[Pantero Blanco]

For a period of several weeks, my ISP was blocking Keenspot.com; at first I thought the site was just down, then I found out that I could reach it if I went through a proxy and used an alternative DNS server . When I called them to ask what was going on, the rep said that they had been DOS attacked from that IP and would not be unblocking it. A few hours after the phone call, though, the site was accessible again.

An attack from Keenspot, of all places, seems very, very unlikely, and I live in one of the most fundamentalist parts of the country, so I'm still a bit suspicious.

Whose ox got gored

[LorenzoV]

I think you either misunderstand the circumstance or are intentionally trying to mislead the readers.

Although I don't much care for AboveNet's own persistent spammers, the ones no amount of complaining will get killed, I cannot support your whine. Here's my thoughts on the subject.

AboveNet has elected to use an RBL like thingie to block all traffic to listed IP addresses.

Your IP address is among those addresses.
For whatever reasons, AboveNet thinks that the owners of those IP addresses are bad-guys, for some definition of bad-guys.

Your ISP, or did you mean hosting provider, is listed among the blocked IP addresses. Careful distinction here: your ISP (or hosting provider) is blocked, not your IP address specifically.

Some DNSbls block whole ranges of IP addresses belonging to an ISP (or really whoever owns the block) because those owners often move a pet spammer to evade blocking. Many network admins simply block the entire range. I block, and never less than a /24.

So, my suggestion to you is to get a new ISP or hosting provider. Quit whining and take action.

Re:Whose ox got gored

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

For whatever reasons, AboveNet thinks that the owners of those IP addresses are bad-guys, for some definition of bad-guys. Your ISP, or did you mean hosting provider, is listed among the blocked IP addresses. Careful distinction here: your ISP (or hosting provider) is blocked, not your IP address specifically.

I feel your argument has fallen apart at this point. The ISP was blocked specifically because of the user's IP. The definition of "bad guy" was that they were providing a perfectly legal service and exercising free speech.

So, my suggestion to you is to get a new ISP or hosting provider. Quit whining and take action.

Sigh, way to miss the point. He can get whatever IP he wants, but if they consistently block whatever CIDR that is from all their customers, without those customers knowing it, then they have effectively prevented his message from reaching people, across networks funded with out tax dollars, because of blocking by a company that is specifically granted immunity to laws that would make them liable for publishing or transporting materials specifically under the auspices that they are simply impartial transmitters of data.

Do you understand the relationship between rights and power and responsibility? Either an ISP does not take responsibility for content and lets anyone communicate or they do take responsibility for content and exercise their right/power to stop content they don't like. They can't have it both ways. If they are going to filter the speech and business of someone they don't like, then when they don't filter the speech and business of child pornographer they should be held responsible for that as well and go to prison.

Re:Freedom for me, none for you

[slackmaster2000]

Are you arguing the freedom of the oppressor?

"But what about my freedom to become a dictator!?"

Re:Translation...

[manifoldronin]

I don't think your analogy is logically appropriate. Filtering spam ends up being source based, not because it should be done that way or anybody wants it to be done that way, but because filtering based on volume isn't possible in most of the cases. In the UPS scenario, as soon as the 10000lbs package walks in, the UPS guys can see right away it's more than what they can handle. On the other hand, nobody can possibly know or assume that a spammer is spamming for the first 10 emails sent. One would have to have observed, say, 10000 emails sent within a short period of time, to realize that he's being spammed. In other words, pure volume-based observation (and in turn any defense) can only be after the fact as far as email spamming goes.

A better analogy would be if someone manages to keep showing up at UPS for 100 times in a day, every time trying to send a 1lb package, and keep doing that for a month. What would happen is the UPS guys would take good care of him for the first couple of days like they would any other customers, but after a week they'd start ignoring him, and after two weeks they'd be calling the cops anytime he walks in. 8-)

Re:Translation...

[leviramsey]

Except that the RBL only put the networks on the list because of web content. As far as I have been able to tell, not one spam has been reported from that network.

The content in question was software that could be used by spammers (and in all honesty, was probably only used by spammers, just like Napster (to bring in a contemporary issue that drove up /.'s page views back then...) was largely used to pirate music), not spamming itself.

The connection with net neutrality is tenuous, at best.

Confused

[Joebert]

So, does this mean my ISP is filtering Bennett Haseltons' website, or did it get Slashdotted ?

Re:Translation...

[leviramsey]

Addendum: even my analogy is inaccurate.

Instead of the "plethora of overweight packages..." replace with "a publisher of a guide to sending overweight packages through UPS resides within...".

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Dan Slotman]

I don't agree with your allegation. The article is certainly long, and it covers a lot of points, but it is distinctly about Net Neutrality except where it gets distracted condemning the people behind MAPS. Here is an executive summary. Most of it is direct quotations, but I did a little editing for clarity and conciseness.

This issue started with the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), a blacklist for spammers, which was started by a group called the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS).

Most ISPs using the RBL used it to filter only incoming e-mail, but AboveNet blocked RBL'ed web sites as well. It turned out that the RBL not only included spammers, but also Web sites that were not sending mail at all but were blocked because of their content -- in our case, our ISP got blocked because some other customers were selling mailing list software that MAPS believed could be too easily abused by spammers. The most controversial feature of the RBL is that if an ISP didn't comply, MAPS would start blacklisting other unrelated sites at the same ISP to put more pressure on them.

This example illustrates two points that go to the heart of what Net Neutrality is, and isn't, about. (1) The difference between blocking incoming spam and blocking Web sites, and (2) the difference between blocking traffic due to spam activity and blocking sites because of content. Net Neutrality is about putting the preferences of the user first; a user should be allowed to visit a website but should also be protected from spam.

But by far the most common objection to my complaint about AboveNet blocking Web sites was, "Hey, if a private company blocks things, as long as they're being honest to their users about it, who cares?" If you're tempted to argue that backbone providers should be allowed to block whatever they want as long as they put it in their AUP, just consider: When you access Google from your home computer, have you read the AUP of every network that the packets pass through, to check whether they reserve the right to block or even modify your traffic? Do you really want the burden to be on you to check with all of them every time there's a problem reaching a Web site? Or do you feel like there's an understanding that as long as you pay your bill, they should let you go wherever you want? [Edit: This is a slippery slope argument, but I'm including it since the point is pretty obvious.]

The modern-day threats to Net Neutrality are different: slowing access to Web sites unless the site owners pay a "toll", instead of blocking access to sites because of the content of other sites hosted at the same ISP. But they both boil down to the same thing: not giving end users what they have already paid for. [Edit: At this point there is a simple review of net neutrality. Read the 10th paragraph and blockquote if you are interested.]

[Edit: A lengthy discussion of where the MAPS people are now and all the (negative) stuff they are saying about Net Neutrality.]

Any informed debate about Net Neutrality has to include the fact that some providers have blocked Web sites on purpose, for long periods of time, and that the free market didn't fix it by itself. Even if something on the scale of outright blocking never happens again, it is wishful thinking to think that the free market and anti-trust laws will prevent ISPs from merely slowing down Web access to sites that haven't paid a "toll".

7 years from now...

[Dan East]

Today:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine.

Seven years from now:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being DOSed by Slashdot was mine.

Also, as a resident of Virginia, the article's title caused me unnecessary concern. Thanks a lot.

Dan East

People Expect to Get What They Pay For.

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>It is not a "right" to access anything you want on the web.

True enough. However, if I pay for "internet access" I expect to get "to access anything you want on the web." If it is clearly disclosed that Brand X ISP gives me access to the internet "except for websites that our CEO and his pastor think are bad for you," I'll make a decision based on that. They don't get to sell one thing and provide another.

Re:People Expect to Get What They Pay For.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

It does seem like false advertising. I'm also concerned about well funded interests buying control and implementing commercial and political filtering policies. The first is illegal. The second should be made illegal. Imagine if the telephone companies "blacklisted" all the environmental activists telephone numbers? Or consumer groups? Or political action groups (of one flavor *or* the other)?

Re:People Expect to Get What They Pay For.

[Deadplant]

Maybe I'm picky but when I pay for an Internet connection I expect to be able to do whatever the feck I want with the IP protocol and any other IP-aware systems that happen to be connected to the Internet.
The web is a pretty important IP-based system that I use all the time but it is only one of the many wonderfull systems that operate on the Internet using the Internet Protocol.
I personally hate ISPs/network admins who give me gibbled Internet access where barely anything except web access works properly.

Re:Translation...

[Qzukk]

OK, I appear to have mis-read

Appear to?

No spam was sent from that network. Another company was using a website in that network to sell mailing list software (that may have never been used for spam, it's a little late now to find out whether they were advertising it as a tool for spammers or as a tool for companies to communicate with all of their employees easily).

The network was never abused by that network. The site was blocked because the owners assumed the worst and were offended by their assumption.

Am I remembering correctly?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only story about peacefire.org being blocked that I can remember is when their ISP (not the tier 1 provider) decided move it to an IP that was already blocked for spamming in an effort to get the address space de-listed, that is, they were using peacefire.org as a "human shield", rather than concentrate on cleaning up their spammers. I don't remember the ISP involved at this time.

Is this the incident that is mentioned in the story? If so, some details were left out...

Your argument almost makes sense

[paladinwannabe2]

The State really says "We won't stop you from transmitting pirated movies, illegal pornography, and bomb recipies, we'll just prosecute you when you do." It's similar to how libel/slander are illegal- they can't stop you from talking, but that can sue you and take away your home if you say the wrong things about the wrong people (and don't have evidence to back yourself up).

You make an interesting point that the ISPs are in bed with the government, and thus if they engaged in censorship it would almost be like the government doing the censoring. I don't think I've seen anyone approach the issue like that before, and I don't think it would hold up in court (unless they somehow show that the government was behind it).

Your ideas are entertaining, all they lack is understanding of the issues and factual support. There are plenty of logical arguments in favor of Net Neutrality- perhaps you could find some, or modify your argument to make sense. Try "ISPs could become a hidden means of government censorship!" or "People should be able to talk about whatever they want in any medium". These ideas are similar to yours, but are supported by available evidence. Try them out!

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Secrity]

ISPs do NOT not have Common Carrier status -- and don't want it.

AT&T/Cingular Blocking Phones from VoIP Servic

[Doc Ruby]

Meanwhile, AT&T/Cingular is blocking its cellular customers from calling into free conferencing services that use VoIP for competing with AT&T/Cingular.

Network Neutrality: it's not just for the Internet. It's just one way we need to protect ourselves from the AT&T monopoly (or its duopoly with Verizon) that America worked so long and hard to obtain 20 years ago. Which AT&T has worked so long and hard since then to endrun, nearly back to its original market control, in a much larger market. A market that expanded only because of the divestiture.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Skreems]

This is absolutely false. Blocking spam from compromised domains, absolutely. I agree with you 100% that blocking those emails is a service to the consumer, and so does the author. But blocking the user from navigating to a website in that IP block, an action which they have explicitly initiated, is another thing entirely. The ISP is selling the user a service (we will connect your browser to the internet), and then breaking it without even telling the user. The motive behind double billing is slightly different, but the execution is the same: sell the user a service, and then break the service you've promised. Only in the new case, they're trying to extort money from 3rd parties in exchange for un-breaking the service again.

Misguided ranting

[cdrguru]

MAPS entire function was to filter the Internet according to their standards. If you failed to meet their standards, they wanted to block you. Totally. Any way that was within their power to do so. This is the entire function of an RBL. The fact that enterprising folks decided to extend this beyond email should be considered simply an extension of the power of an RBL. Anti-spammers are a rabid crowd with all the morals of a mob.

More meaningless ranting about ISP pricing. Unfortunately, I copied the paragraph below:

Which leads to the third misconception: "Here's the thing that the 3Ns (Net Neutrality Nuts) don't get: bandwidth costs money... So, if a net neutrality law passes, don't be surprised when your costs to have an Internet account skyrocket." But it's not about how much a service costs, but about the ethics of double-billing for it. We know that ISP pricing models can already support the total traffic that people consume today, and ISPs do already follow net neutrality principles most of the time, so nobody's costs will "skyrocket" just because a neutrality law passes. If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell" as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r. Much as we all love our unmetered connections, it wouldn't be a violation of Net Neutrality for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth hogging, to keep everyone from going too far above today's levels. What ISPs should not do is charge users for implied full-throttle connections, and then turn around to charge publishers for moving bits over those same lines, or block the connection for any other reason.

Sadly, this guy is living in a fantasy world where people pay for stuff they use and companies deliver what their advertising says they are selling. ISPs today do not generally have any sort of "metered" plan - they have the one-size-fits-all jumbo-mega plan. They may have a secret cap at which they turn your connection off, but there isn't a higher priced plan that you can pay extra for and get the cap removed. Oh, and did you notice that with the lower prices the supposed speeds keep increasing but the actual content delivery rate remains the same? Sure, your connection to the ISP is at the rate they advertise but your ability to use that stops at their 2nd or 3rd router.

You see, what you are paying for today is a plan with a very high bit rate but is qualified with the term "bursting". This means that you can get a lot of bits very quickly for a short period of time but not continuously. They don't have the network capacity to provide you 10-12 megabits continuously. At least not when your neighbor wants it also. The good news is that today there isn't much content out there that the average Joe is looking for that requires anything better than a burstable connection that averages quite a bit less than whatever they think they are paying for. But this is beginning to change.

Are you paying more than $15 a month for DSL? If so, you are getting ripped off. SBC/Yahoo has been advertising $15 a month rates for "new customers" for quite a while now. Cable prices have been falling as well - mostly in an attempt to keep building customer base. Nobody is paying a rate commesurate with what the service actually costs anymore. You are paying a rate which has been carefully worked out to provide an increasing customer base - greater market penetration - and will let them pay salaries of people hooking up new customers. New equipment? Increased throughput? Better external connections? Nope, no money for that.

We are going to see some interesting

Re:Translation...

[manifoldronin]

Yes, I stand by that. peacefire.org is hosted at a provider that also hosts a fair number of spammers. The owner's been complaining about this for a long time. He knows what kind of people he's standing with. He declines to move. Those spammers are blocked by the RBL, which means all sites on the same machines are blocked. Including peacefire.org.

If school buses refuse to go through anywhere in your neighborhood because one of your neighbors is a registered offender, would you move somewhere else or would you complain against the school bus system?

Re:Freedom for me, none for you

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Freedom for ME, none for YOU. Especially if YOU are an ISP.

Well, if you're an ISP and built your network using money the government gave you which they took from me under threat of prison time, I'd say I ethically should have some say in how my money is used. Also, if the government is granting you special exceptions from laws that restrict my actions, under the claim that it is because you're providing a public good, well maybe you should be held accountable when your actions are demonstrably not in the public good in that particular way.

But ISPs should announce blocking before signup

[Lonewolf666]

After all, the customer pays for the access. If a provider sells "internet access" without making clear that they might block content on a whim, by all means whack them for fraud.

Now try to sell internet access while writing in your advertisments that it is only limited access. Good luck ;-)

I have to object to a quote in the article

[GuyverDH]

Because somebody has to pay those bills, and if the law says that the ISPs can't charge the big guys - the big users - differently, it means that they have to charge them the same rate that they charge everyone else. And that means not that their rate will go down, but that everybody else's rate will go up.

Uhh - That bandwidth has already been paid for.

The content providers pay their ISPs for bandwidth in/out.
The users pay their ISPs for bandwidth in/out.
The ISPs pay the backbone providers for bandwidth in/out.

Adding any additional layers of charges onto this is double dipping, period - and should be treated as such.

The end-user who already pays for their bandwidth are the ones choosing to download from a site or content provider.

Should a content provider be asked to pay (again, for something that's already been paid for) just because one of it's users has asked for content to be pushed to them?

No.

That's just fucking greed on the part of the ISPs and backbone providers.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anybody

[scgops]

Doesn't this long rant about evil, nefarious ISPs silently blocking web sites come down to a question of whether or not a business has the right to refuse service? This isn't a neutrality question, because the ISPs didn't give their customers the choice of paying an extra $5 per month to access content that would otherwise be blocked.

Let's take an egregious example. What would happen if a blacklist operator decided to flag all of UUnet's IP address space based on a high volume of spam complaints? And what if other ISPs then used the blacklist to blackhole all traffic from UUnet?

Anyone doing this could easily defend it as a cost-limiting move, aimed at decreasing the bandwidth costs of delivering spam. Meanwhile, UUnet and their customers wouldn't have a whole lot of legal grounds for complaint. It would be largely up to the downstream customers of the other ISPs to push their providers to lift the block or, if unsatisfied with the service they are provided, to move to another ISP.

This isn't entirely hypothetical. There are blacklists out there with UUnet's entire IP space. The mail servers I maintain are using UUnet-provided IP addresses, and we have had multiple cases over the years where companies using those blacklists couldn't communicate with us over email. It wouldn't take a big leap for the blacklists to be applied to web traffic, too, perhaps under the guise of providing additional anti-phishing protection.

I've done something similar myself, in regards to Korean IP address ranges. At the time, we had no customers in Korea. Eventually, though, someone in Korea did want to consider subscribing to our services, and my downstream customers, a.k.a. internal users, asked me to lift the block.

I don't see where AboveNet was doing anything unreasonable.

Flip-flop = Evil?!?

[RingDev]

Even worse, it's a rant about something that happened 7 years ago. And he's still holding a hand full of people accountable for something a corporation did back then.

Why do people get stuck on this whole 'not changing their minds' crap. It's like if you are a war backer, then go to war, come home and say "Ya know, war isn't so grand." You get labeled as a 'flip-flopper' and discredited. At some point along the way it became a social evil to learn from your mistakes and change your mind.

So some board wrote a policy 7 years ago that pissed this guy off, and since then, some of the members of that board have been working on steps that are at odds with that policy. Does it have to be irony? Or could it just be that over the last 7 years their understanding of the Internet and the related social-economic impacts has grown and they have changed their minds?

-Rick

Re:Flip-flop = Evil?!?

[tsm_sf]

You get an A+ for speed reading, but a D for comprehension. I know it's a lot of words, and words are hard to read

  - when they're not bullet pointed

but he's trying to express a complex situation.

  - He draws a parallel between censorship and bandwidth throttling
  - He points out the fraud that occurs when your ISP censors or throttles sites you choose to visit
  - He wanted to see if the people involved in his case 7 years ago were now pro or anti net-neutrality
      - some were 'still' anti, some had changed to pro!

Hope that helped!

AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

We're gonna come back around full circle to the way things were in the olden days of "online" computer communications and mega-BBS-like online service providers like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy were back in their day before the web.

If you want to access Compuserve content, you had to buy a Compuserve account and dial up their system. If you wanted to access AOL content, you had to buy an AOL account and dial up their system, etc. It's going to become the same way again, except there'll be no dialing, it'll be broadband, but every broadband provider will privatize their realms and stop cooperating with other providers.

Full circle indeed.

Re:AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc

[Doc Ruby]

The giant ISPs like AT&T are trying to carve out new "walled gardens" like AOL.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[fatboy]

ISPs are not and never have been "common carriers". Common carriers may be ISPs, but not always.

Re:Freedom for me, none for you

[darjen]

Well, if you're an ISP and built your network using money the government gave you which they took from me under threat of prison time, I'd say I ethically should have some say in how my money is used. Also, if the government is granting you special exceptions from laws that restrict my actions, under the claim that it is because you're providing a public good, well maybe you should be held accountable when your actions are demonstrably not in the public good in that particular way.

It sounds good, but the problem then becomes: how do you define what is a public good? And who gets the last say in this definition, and why?

Re:Freedom for me, none for you

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It sounds good, but the problem then becomes: how do you define what is a public good? And who gets the last say in this definition, and why?

The people of course, and not just a simple majority. We have a constitution and bill of rights for a reason. More specifically, you need only hold the ISPs to a standard of impartiality such as would be expected of any contractor working on behalf of the taxpayer. The government has already stepped in supposedly on behalf of the people and taken our money and built networks which were then given away. It has granted geographical monopolies to certain companies. It has granted certain companies immunity from the law in exchange for acting as impartial common carriers. It makes sense to me that we actually hold them to that standard to act impartially or rescind their immunity, don't you think?

Depends who's service you mean

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISP is selling service to you. If you want to go to a site and the ISP blocks you silently (or misleadingly) then they are refusing service to you, the customer.

But why? And if they do, can you, the customer, get a rebate for reduced service?

Now, if this fella was being blocked from sending IP requests out uninitiated and unwanted, then they are refusinging this fella service.

Is this what is happening? 'cos it reads to me like if I'd tried to access his site, I wouldn't be allowed to get there. Even if it were KP, this should not happen. Report me for looking at KP, yes, but don't block me.

So AboveNet aren't denying him service, they are denying their customer their service, yet still asking for the full wad off them.

Unless you can show me different.

Too Long

[JesterXXV]

I refuse to read this. Brevity is a virtue. I have too much other crap to worry about.

"So, yes, Virginia, "

[stratjakt]

CmdrTaco, you sir, are a complete fucking retard.

This has nothing to do with Virginia the state, fix the fucking headline, and read the goddamn submissions.

(Pro Tip: It's a reference to the famous "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter. Google that up on your powerbook)

can't see peacefire.org!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sitting at my desk at the University of California in San Diego and I can't see the peacefire.org website. If I google it, it shows up on top, but I can only view the google cached version, not the actual website. Probably it's getting slashdotted, since UC or our ISP wouldn't be censoring it right? Probably it's the slashdotting, since I can't see it through stupidcensorship.com either.

Re:can't see peacefire.org!

[GRW]

I tried several anonymous proxy servers and still couldn't reach peacfire, so perhaps their server is down for some reason.

Free Speech?

[Evil W1zard]

Since this article is talking about what ISPS do in the US... Violation of Free Speech in terms of the US Constitution only applies to government regulated speech. This is an ISP blocking valid websites and thus it is not a violation of your first amendment right to freedom of speech.

This is merely a company providing a service and that service is degraded...

Which ISP's?

[kipin]

I happed live in Virginia, and am just curious if anyone knows which ISP's are downgrading sites they don't like.

Re:AT&T/Cingular Blocking Phones from VoIP Ser

[Software]

Your link does not make it sound so cut-and-dry.

The 712 area code used by these services allow the local carriers to charge a number of subsidies to those carrying the incoming calls due to the location of the tiny, rural exchange. These fees are split between the local exchange and the "free" conference call company, which allows them to make a pretty penny. The fees for these calls made into 712 are higher than those charged by other exchanges, and AT&T/Cingular has in fact filed a lawsuit against these Iowa-based telcos for what Cingular claims are violation of a number of laws and FCC decisions. In the meantime, Cingular is not waiting on the outcome of the lawsuit to protect itself.

It sounds to me like the free conferencing services are using a loophole to force Cingular to pay extra to the local exchanges, then the conferencing services are taking a kickback from those exchanges.

Re:We reserve the right to refuse service to anybo

[Anonymous Coward]

We reserve the right to refuse service to anybody

Actually, you don't have that right. If you sell to the public, you need to have a valid reason for refusing service to someone.

That's why you don't see stores with 'no negroes allowed' signs in the window anymore.

You think a little ISP filtering is bad?

[scottv67]

Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine.

To throw a little salt on that wound, Websense has your website (www.peacefire.org) categorized as "Proxy Avoidance". There are probably a LOT of Websense customers who can't get to your website.

Re:Translation...

[computational super]

Did you read as far as the 5th word in the title?

Dude, I don't even have time to read other people's comments before I post angry disagreements to them - I sure as hell don't have time to read something I have to scroll to see all of. You gotta get in tune with the internet generation, man.

Hate to break it to you...

[rehtonAesoohC]

A communication error occurred: "Connection refused".

Apparently you're still being blocked =\

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT not is a double negative, and therefore cancels eachother out. Your sentence when properly translated would read

ISPs do have Common Carrier status -- and don't want it.

So, ISP(s) have regret?

Re:Translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read as far as the 5th word in the title?

You must be new here.

And hey, what's that symbol next to your user ID? Is that to identify new users or something?

Connection Refused.

[Irvu]

Is anyone else getting a "Connection Refused" reply when going to "www.peacefire.org"?

Re:Connection Refused.

[Lehk228]

slashdotted i presume

Re:Connection Refused.

[Samdroid]

Mirrordot link

Enjoy.

Re:Connection Refused.

[Irvu]

Thanks.

Re:Connection Refused.

[Handpaper]

Nope, I can ping it (average 120ms) from here (Demon is my ISP), but can't load the page.

I'll be on to them in the morning, I don't expect this kind of behaviour from on of the UK's oldest ISPs.

Re:Translation...

[skoaldipper]

Yes, I stand by that. peacefire.org is hosted at a provider that also hosts a fair number of spammers.

Interesting. I have SBC/Yahoo DSL and cannot access that site. I wonder when I report spam abuse in yahoo mail, if that information isn't somehow relayed back to another SBC channel (and the aggregate of those spam origins are used to generate block lists based on a %).

Re:AT&T/Cingular Blocking Phones from VoIP Ser

[Doc Ruby]

I'm not so sure that the reasons AT&T/Cingular wants to block them are cut and dried. But their power to block them seems cut and dried to AT&T, at their sole discretion. If they're blocking abuse, they have regulatory ways to stop it. But they're just blocking it. Even if today's reasons are good ones, tomorrow's might not be, at AT&T's discretion. And with a solid precedent, AT&T will have more safety in abusing that power.

Some more facts on the Peacefire fiasco

[efalk]

In 2000, Peacefire was hosted by ISP Media3, which also hosted of major spammers. That year, Media3 moved Peacefire into a new block of IP addresses which it knew was already listed in the MAPS RBL due to spamming. No reason was ever given for this move. Speculation was that this was either some sort of publicity stunt, or that Media3 was trying to use Peacefire as a sort of "human shield" to convince MAPS to drop the listing. That's when Haselton began complaining about censorship.

It was suggested that Haselton ask Media3 to move him back out of the block of IP addresses being listed. He refused. Haselton was offered free hosting at other ISPs which were not listed in the RBL. He refused. It almost seemed like he wanted to be listed in the RBL to make some sort of point.

More details can be found in the San Francisco Chronicle article Markets battle with e-mail activists over your inbox and Usenet threads The truth behind Peacefire/Media3, and Media3/Peacefire developments.

Re:Some more facts on the Peacefire fiasco

[tkinnun0]

Fiasco? It was one of the first battles over Net Neutrality and the good guys won, bad ISPs lost!

Re:Some more facts on the Peacefire fiasco

[Burz]

Interesting.

But can you tell me what business ISPs have blocking whole IP blocks?

Re:Some more facts on the Peacefire fiasco

[bennetthaselton]

Read the article.

I pointed out that the move was announced before Media3 had ever heard from MAPS. So much for the "human shield" theory.

Furthermore, there is a quote in the article from someone at MAPS saying that they could unblock our site if they wanted to, but they weren't going to. It was their decision.

The period when people were "telling me to go to some other host", was after AboveNet had unblocked our site as a result of the embarrassing publicity on Slashdot. We also did not use our server to send any mail, so there was no point in trying to get off the RBL then.

Re:Some more facts on the Peacefire fiasco

[Anonymous Coward]

what business ISPs have blocking whole IP blocks?

"Their networks - their rules" business?

ISPs usually own IP blocks. When an ISP decides to let their (ab)users to do whatever they please on the ISPs' net-space, allows them to abuse other networks owned by other ISPs, and refuses to stop the abuse, other ISPs are free to block the rogue (like Media3 in this case) ISP. If you, as a customer of one of those other ISPs, don't like it, you are free to sign up with another ISP, or to create your own ISP.

Haselton, Bias? Whodathunkit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haselton writes: "Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine."

Bias is not the right word for Haselton. Better is "extremely bias and willing to spin the truth until it gives up".

"Walled Gardens" ... Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

I never knew the concept I was trying to describe had a particular name... "walled gardens". Thanks!

Re:Hear! Hear!

[jp10558]

Spam is unsolicited. Websites in general are not. I can usually opt-out of spam filtering either individually or en-masse. If I can do the same with blocked web sites then fine - but it needs to be as clear as the junkmail folder / spam notice so I know what the problem is, and how to bypass it if I want to.

Why do I want this? Because I want to decide what sites I go to. I probably won't agree with someone else's decisions.

Congratulations!

[DragonTHC]

You do not have ADD!

You made it to the end of the drudgingly long article and have now lost 3 minutes of your life!

Re:We reserve the right to refuse service to anybo

[jp10558]

Right, but in this case you're refusing service to your customer AFTER they paid for the service. This is basically fraud or cheating. You're not providing a service to some random website, you're providing a service to your paying customers. In general that serivice is understood as being a connection to the internet. Now you want to prevent them from connecting to part of the internet. Without notice.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn english -- this is not a double negative, it's a compound sentence where the second clause ("and they don't want it") has an implied subject ("they").

So many are soooo missing the point

[suitepotato]

These blocks are happening, and happening frequently. They are being applied to individual IP addresses and complete ranges. These blocks are going up against web servers which host many websites because a single website hosted there offends AboveNet. On top of this, they are blocking sites which have nothing to do with spam as far as generating it goes. Why? Well like the old SORBS my guess would be blackmail. Either stop carrying content we don't like or we'll split the net up and make getting to you next to impossible. Maybe if you appease us or pay us or give us other compensation, we'll unblock you. THAT is where this is all headed without net neutrality regulations keeping them from engaging in this behavior. If they refuse to follow net neutrality and let the users at each end take the responsibilities, then they will in short order be held responsible instead and that means every single time a sexual predator trolls a teen chat room, they will be held responsible for letting it happen and not monitoring their activities to the last zero and one and stopping them. They will be held responsible when some parent goes ballistic over finding their teen son surfed for buttsecks pr0n. When someone posts a death threat, stalks someone, posts something illegal, says something that offends someone else, they will be held responsible. THAT is where all this is headed and if you want to play stupid and deny this, go right ahead, but some things are true whether or not you believe in them and human nature and our political and social history point it out clearly that we will go this direction. I signed up to transfer information of my choosing back and forth with other people of my choosing and they as well vice versa. We DID NOT sign up for Romper Room where network nannies all get to have a say at what I cannot see, cannot say, cannot etc. What can be abused by one side, can be abused by all sides and just as with the odious team-up between right-wing sexually repressed anti-pron zealots to my right and frigid tempermental misandronist feminists on my left against pr0n, we're asking for all the worst instincts of ALL sides to be given free reign to interfere with the Internet. While the geeks and nerds may think a cyberpunk warfare future of tightening controls versus noble net rebels fighting to surf is a cool idea, I don't.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[ajs]

This is absolutely false. Blocking spam from compromised domains, absolutely. I agree with you 100% that blocking those emails is a service to the consumer, and so does the author. Yes, but that's not what I was talking about. He's essentially taken a mental snapshot of spam-fighting techniques, and has decided that anyone who did anything he didn't like is fundamentally wrong on any related issue, going forward. He's free to think that, but this is not an article about net neutrality, it's an article about his historical spam-blocking pet peeves and how they RELATE to some individuals who currently have a net neutrality opinion.

Re:Translation...

[LWATCDR]

I will try to explain it.
Each machine on the internet has an address. Those are called IP addresses.
The company that hosts the website peacefire also hosts a bunch of spammers. They moved peacefire to the a block of IP address that spammers use.
Spam uses a lot of bandwidth so many ISPs just block everything from those address to save on the bandwidth. You see ISPs have to pay for bandwidth so in effect they are the ones that pay for the SPAM emails we all get.
The Hosting company moved Peacefire to that address because they knew that it would get blocked. The guy that runs Peacefire has turned down free hosting to make some point about censorship or to get free publicity and the front page of slashdot.
If you wonder why you would block not just the mail port but everything coming from those address it is simple. They can use those addresses for images in html spam. A lot of time it might just be a single pixel. By looking at the logs you can then tell what email address are valid address.
The real lesson here is if you lie down with dogs you get fleas. You host with a company that hosts spammers there is a good chance you will get black listed.

It's my network

[OriginalArlen]

...and I'll block who I want to.

That goes for UU or Above.Net as much as the teensy networkette I actually run. If my users don't like it, I'll lose em.

Network neutrality is the wrong solution to the real problem, which is last-mile monopolies in the US domestic ISP market. Sort your government out, make it illegal to buy law enforcement, and join the rest of us in the 21st Century. Or don't. Personally, I couldn't give a fuck, as I'm not in the US.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[slashdotusername]

If ISPs were liable for the content they carried, would they bother carrying any content?

Othe incidents

[Punto]

I remember from a couple of years ago (I don't have a link tho), the URL for the website of a contestant of "australian idol" was missprinted (they dropped the .au I think), and the visitors ended up on a dead gay (male) porn star's website instead. So the big ISPs in australia took over the domain and redirected the users to the other boring website. It wasn't silent (they actually put a notice that they were being redirected), but still, the poor dead gay porn star guy had no say in the matter.

I consider australia to be a part of the "free world", so yeah, it happens.

Re:Othe incidents

[aaza]

I think it was Casey Donovan, and it wasn't an ISP who redirected the requests, but Telstra (an ISP, but also the major telecommunications player, and the primary internet link into/out of Australia) that changed all requests for the .com address (even those who actually wanted to go to a gay pornstar's website) to the .com.au address (which was for some crap manufactured Australian Idol winner).

There were some thoughts of asking the .com site to put up a confirmation page, possibly based on Australian IP ranges, with a link to the real .com site if they wanted it, but a redirect back to .com.au otherwise (much like nasa.com did for nasa.gov when the mars rover landed). As I recall, either it was not asked, or the .com site didn't want to (or were asking for too much money to do so). I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I know that there were concerns that Telstra was (illegally?) diverting traffic from one website to another.

Re:Hear! Hear!

[winkydink]

Assuming you are an average, consumer ISP customer, chances are extremely high that your ISP is doing anti-spam filtering at the border and you most certainly cannot opt-out.

KKK and hate speech

[falconwolf]

the KKK's speech with a history of the civil war. Not to mention that something like 'hate speech' is almost entirely subjective,

Yeap, what can be called "hate speech" is entirely subjective. And I disagree with any and all laws making "hate speech" illegal. By making them illegal all you do is drive them underground. Instead what's needed to fight "hate speech" is to debate on the merits, or lack thereof, and the facts, or lack thereof. If those making such speechs won't participate then it just goes to show they don't have much to stand on. I support the KKK, NAZIs, Nation of Islam, and any other group in their exercise of free speech even though I may disagree with what they say.

Falcon

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[644bd346996]

Your comment did exactly nothing to clarify the situation. In American English, double negatives are always ambiguous (though that is more an issue with the users of the language than the language itself).

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[dosquatch]

True, ISPs do not have CC status. That status carries with it certain obligations that would be... let's say "inconvenient"... for the providers to meet, like universal coverage. Even in cases where the ISP is also a phone company (DSL providers), the ISP side of the house is a separate business unit.

The other side of this story, though, is that for those obligations, a common carrier is afforded some really desirable perks, like guaranteed right-of-way.

The problem is that in these "hybrid" companies, the ISP side of the house gets all of the benefits of CC status (hey, the lines are already there, whaddaya know?) without any of the burden (we don't feel like providing DSL coverage to your neighborhood. Ever.)

No, they as ISPs don't want CC status. Given the reasons why, and how they (ab)use it to their advantage, it seems only fair that either have their CC status stripped on the phone side of the house, or have it forced upon them on the ISP side.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Sancho]

That said, legitimate e-mails get blocked when RBLs get overzealous. If I pay to have a connection and an e-mail address to correspond with people who happen to be on the same netblock as a spammer, my "connection" to that person may be cut off.

ISPs should provide an IP address, and should not restrict based upon throughput, data rate, RBL, or any other arbitrary mechanism unless they explicitly notify the customer. If they wish to provide this service, great. They could probably even charge for "advanced spam filtering" or whatever. But there is not reason to block access (in either direction) without the customer's consent.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Skreems]

It's not what he was talking about primarily either. He used it an example before launching into the main problem, which is taking spam blocking past the point of just blocking spam, and turning it into domain blacklisting, for even user-initiated actions.

Spamhaus

[Anonymous Coward]

to a model such as Spamhaus's where sites are filtered based on a) being a spam source b) being identified as a highly probable spam source (e.g. zombied PCs, open proxies, etc.) or c) being identified as a service which chronically abuses spamming as a marketing technique (e.g. servers whose Web services are commonly and often exclusively advertised in spam).

Funny that you mention the wonderful model of Spamhaus. I did some work for a small hosting company, and one of the dedicated server customers was sending spam emails from the machine he was paying for. As soon as this was noticed, the account was closed. Unfortunately, by that time, Spamhaus had listed the entire /20. Repeated communications between the company and Spamhaus have helped nothing. That was more than 6 months ago, no further spam has come from this IP range, yet it is still listed by Spamhaus. Wonderful model, indeed.

-1: Troll

[deepestblue]

Is there a way I can mod a whole story "-1: Troll"?

Not the first time this has happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Up in western Canada, Telus, our major phone and internet provider, blocked internet access to the union site during a strike.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/24/phone_company _blocks.html

Re:Hear! Hear!

[jp10558]

IDK, my Yahoo mail seems to get plenty of SPAM into the junkmail folder. Maybe they also filter things and silently discard them, I have no idea.

Telephony ISPs have common carrier status

[snowwrestler]

Due to legacy regulation held over from analog telephony/cable days.

Cable ISPs do not, thanks to a recent decision by the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That is the whole basis of this fight right now. The telephony guys want Congress to strip their offerings of common carrier status so they can compete with the cable guys. But that would also strip all the protections we've come to take for granted about the Internet, like not blocking Web sites based on political speech, etc.

All the existing regulatory structure will be completely useless if that happens, because it's all based on statutory authority. A new law from Congress overrides existing laws and existing regulatory power. If the new law says that ISPs are not common carrier, then they are essentially private networks and are free to limit their traffic however they see fit--and the FCC would have nothing to say about it. When it comes to threats from Congress, FCC assurances are not worth the paper they're printed on.

It is a real danger and just because it's "hard to imagine" doesn't mean we should ignore it.

common carrier status is exactly what

[alizard]

they're risking here. Lawsuit time?

Give up now.

[StarKruzr]

The definition of "begging the question" has essentially changed (or been appended to) because people think it sounds erudite and want to use it when it makes no sense.

You can't win, my friend.

Re:Give up now.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are a no accomplishment in the field of computer science 'anonymous luser', StarKruzr. We all know it, and we humor you in your laziness and stupidity. Talk about someone losing a fight before it can begin StarKruzr? We all know you are a no good for nothing loser. You refuse to answer a question asked of you here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227563&thresho ld=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=18435701

Why is that? Truth hurt?? hahahahahaha... What a loser you are StarKruzr: Actually proud of trolling others as you stated in replies to that url above, but avoiding answering the question. What an effete loser you truly are.

peacefire.org is unreachable to me

[zhrike]

Cavalier DSL. Sons of bitches!

Re:Hear! Hear!

[winkydink]

You bet they do. More spam = more storage = greater operating cost.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Kalriath]

Indeed, UK English is the same. The GP still makes no sense.

my original title was 'Yes Virginia, ISPs have...'

[bennetthaselton]

My original title was: Yes Virginia, ISPs have silently blocked Web sites Somehow it got changed to: Virginia ISPs Silently Blocking Websites which makes no sense. My title was in the sense of "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause", i.e. trying to convince people of something that a lot of people seem to think is a myth :)

my original title was 'Yes Virginia, ISPs have...'

[bennetthaselton]

My original title was: Yes Virginia, ISPs have silently blocked Web sites For some reason they changed it to: Virginia ISPs Silently Blocking Websites which makes no sense. My title was in the sense of "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause", i.e. trying to convince people of something that a lot of people seem to think is a myth :)

Re:my original title was 'Yes Virginia, ISPs have.

[g051051]

Oh, I figured that's what you meant (and sent). I just wish the editors would fix serious mistakes like this once they're notified. I would have mentioned it in the "preview period", but since it was attached as a story instead of a link, I couldn't read it to vette it until it was posted (and somehow too late to fix.)

Re:500 word summary, courtesy of Summarize

[FFFish]

Selecting everything after the cut-line (and so it was trying to summarize the pull-quotes, too), OS X's Summarize service spits out the following. I don't think it's nearly as good as what Word did.

--snip--->

And it turned out that the RBL not only included spammers, but also Web sites that were not sending mail at all but were blocked because of their content -- in our case, our ISP got blocked because some other customers were selling mailing list software that MAPS believed could be too easily abused by spammers. ...If you're tempted to argue that backbone providers should be allowed to block whatever they want as long as they bury it in their AUP (although AboveNet and TeleGlobe didn't even do that much), just consider: When you access Google from your home computer, have you read the AUP of every network that the packets pass through, to check whether they reserve the right to block or even modify your traffic? ...At the time, I'd just spent four years telling people that kids looking at porn was a non-issue, and that by the way if their kids came to my Web site I'd even help them get around their blocking software, and I still got more angry e-mails for disclosing the fact that AboveNet blocked Web sites based on their content, than I'd gotten in all the previous four years combined. ...If vastly more people start trying to stream CNN over the Internet 24/7, and fully using the services that ISPs have "only been pretending to sell" as Brad Templeton put it, then ISPs may have to charge more for users who consume too much bandwidth, encouraging people to stay at today's average levels by rationing themselves and perhaps watching 24 on their $5,000 TV sets sometimes instead of downloading it off of BitTorrent to their laptop every week because it makes them feel like a haX0r.

Full disclosure is bad?

[Selanit]

Ok, when your argument begins with an 7 year old gripe about actions that were directed at you, any suggestion of objectivity goes right out the door.

Question: which of the following is worse?

1. Revealing your personal stake in the issue
2. Conveniently forgetting to mention that little detail

Call me crazy, but I'd rather read an honest writer who reveals his bias than a dishonest writer who conceals it.

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[Mr. Roadkill]

This is absolutely false. Blocking spam from compromised domains, absolutely. I agree with you 100% that blocking those emails is a service to the consumer, and so does the author. But blocking the user from navigating to a website in that IP block, an action which they have explicitly initiated, is another thing entirely.

But DID the user explicity initiate the connection? Or was it due to something installed on their computer without their knowledge? Additionally, what's the difference between blocking known spam sources, and blocking connections to an IP address recognised as delivering nasty payloads?

Take a look at, for example, http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL434 89

A few IPs in that range were mentioned in an AUSCERT notification relating to trojan activity last week. Examination of my proxy logs indicated rather a lot of other unwanted activity for various other IP addresses throughout that range - typical "phone home" zombie stuff. As a result, I've put a blanket ban on web access to that range. The stuff on installing trojans appears to have been added to the SpamHaus listing this week - when I last looked, it was all about spam that originated from that range. This suggests that those who used to spam from these kind of ranges now do so from compromised machines and use their address space to host command/control machines and serve up browser exploits. The original purpose of the SpamHaus data was to indicate spam sources, but the abusers of many of those listed networks may have changed their strategy in response to being listed there.

Further examination of my proxy logs revealed something else - a significant number of connections to numeric addresses that turned out to be listed in various dynamic/dial-up RBLs, and had similar "phone home" or botnet-participant markers.

Now, we're a .edu.TLD, and as such a certain amount of openness and "academic freedom" is required... so I suspect that a blanket-ban on machines on our network establishing connections to web services on dynamic IP addresses won't fly - students and staff will set up home servers, hobbyists will run stuff off dynamic connections, etc. It's something that could be VERY important and useful to corporate or government IT departments, though, and I can see no reason why I wouldn't be able to get away with blocking web access to IPs listed in the SBL/XBL if I ran it past management and could find an easy and reliable way to implement it and monitor/whitelist anything that probably shouldn't be blocked that accidentally slips in... or until the site owners can get a legitimate listing resolved if I don't think there's a risk to my users from such a whitelisting, in much the same way as I can and do whitelist around email blocks.

I agree that it's an area with many questions unresolved and many grey areas, and I welcome the fact that people are starting to discuss this seriously. There is room for abuse in this kind of blocking, which is why transparency and accountability - and maybe a shitload of logging, too - are needed if it happens. I don't expect ISPs to capriciously block sites that they don't agree with politically or which compete with them commercially, and would kick up a stink if I found one had done that to me... but by the same token, if they knew another network was a source of abusive traffic and did nothing to stop that abusive traffic traversing their network I'd want to know why not.

Same-o same-o

[pubwvj]

This has been going on for years. AOL and Comcast are big offenders of blocking. AOL blocks my mail and web from visitors. Comcast blocks my mail from people I used to be able to send to. I've never done spam or anything, they just unilaterally decide to block out addresses. They are taking the decision out of the hands of their customers who want access. That is wrong.

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just spoken to Abovenet about this and this is blatantly not true. They have no policy of blocking hosts on their network, RBL is only used on mail servers that they run for clients. Check your facts before posting rants like this. There was a completely seperate incident about a different ISP blocking content, but this had nothing to do with Abovenet. Is it really necessary to drag up ill informed information from 7 years ago and dress it up as fact? (Only anonymous coward because I've lost my log in)

The most idiotic net neutrality rant ever

[Richard Bennett]

Kudos to Tacos for this miserable wastage of electrons. The article goes on forever, contains little but fantasies and conspiracy theories, and ultimately has nothing at all to do with the subject matter.

It does illustrate one of the Great Dangers of Net Neutrality, however: if the law mandates specific network behavior, every router misconfiguration is a criminal offense, whether it's intentional or not, and whether it's done for a revenue-enhancing purpose or not. The neutrinos were all screaming a few months ago about Cox Cable allegedly blocking Craig's List and it turned out the cause of the problem was the window size advertised by Craig's List and a spam filter, nothing to do with net neutrality.

Is a little consideration for the reader too much to ask?

Re:The ISPs should lose their 'common carrier' sta

[nobuddy]

If you do not block the money-path of a spammer, you will never stop the spammer. A spam host is one that allos their spammers to remain. Be that the sending spammer, or the return link location, they must go. I got caught in a blacklist black hole, and it sucked. But, the host was refusing to disconnect a spammer (Andrew Brunner, spamware maker and spammer was the culprit) so the entire host was blacklisted. Know what I did? I quit giving a spam enabler my money and re-located the site to another host. It was a business site, and the move sucked... but why stay with a host that allows scum a protected stay? Let them enjoy their intranet without me.

Just a note

[nobuddy]

The RBL blocks nobody. No one. Not a single person, place, or thing. Nada. They publish a blackhole list. ISP's choose to use that list or not to block.

Oh, I admit it all the way.

[StarKruzr]

I love trolling you. It's hysterical.

P.S. It can't be a "fight" if one party is swinging away in a blind rage and the other one is sitting back laughing at the other's inability to resist charging a waving red cloak.

Re:Oh, I admit it all the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's TOO easy, making you look like the big talker you are here:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227563&thre shold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=18435701

but nothing to backup your bullshit, here:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227563&cid= 18457609

You're right: It's not a fight, if it's not between equals. You are by no means apk's equal (and certainly not his superior in this field) by any means. You were given every opportunity to show you were, and yet ran.

You were asked to prove you were better than apk, after trying some lame 'trolling' cut down (the province of immature idiots and losers) and thus, able to judge him via visible accomplishments he has vs. your own.

You could produce nothing, lol... what a dumb, jealous little cunt. You said you are a woman in another thread here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227475&cid=184 94155

This is not acting like a lady. It is acting like a CUNT! Plain and simple, and a big talking cunt no less.

LOL, and a lesbian to boot (since you said your g/f left you recently, no small wonder). You have issues, you twisted mental freak. You're an aberration of nature, plain and simple (a genetic error, with mentally disturbed results) this is plain to see now.

Re:We reserve the right to refuse service to anybo

[scgops]

Fraud or cheating? Hardly. I'm sure AboveNet's terms and conditions at the time said something about them having discretion to terminate any or all connectivity.

I don't see a big wave of complaints from AboveNet customers about this, or a class action suit. I see an ISP blocking access to a site that promotes the use of anonymizing web proxies. I wouldn't be surprised if they also blocked access to a number of open proxies. In my mind, that's not a bad thing at all. Far to the contrary, I would expect it to cut down on the number of botnet infestations among their customer base, as well as reducing their likelihood of getting dragged into the middle of an FBI hunt for purveyors of KP.

As an ISP, AboveNet's liability would have rather small. At the most, they might have needed to let disgruntled customers out of their contracts early and possibly refund initial connection fees and/or a few months of service fees.

I've worked for companies that have been dragged into lawsuits as innocent third parties. If I were running an ISP, I would consider myself highly incented to find ways to limit the risk of that happening. Blocking access to open proxies and sites that promote their use are right in line with actions I would consider entirely appropriate. Any customer not wanting to live within those terms of service would be completely welcome to take their business elsewhere.

peacefire.org is blocked

[Anonymous Coward]

peacefire.org is blocked from my hotel on Oakland... (DSL on pacbell.net)
Same story - no timeout, just no connect.