ISPs Violating Net Neutrality To Block Encryption

Dupple writes One of the most frequent refrains from the big broadband players and their friends who are fighting against net neutrality rules is that there's no evidence that ISPs have been abusing a lack of net neutrality rules in the past, so why would they start now? That does ignore multiple instances of violations in the past, but in combing through the comments submitted to the FCC concerning net neutrality, we came across one very interesting one that actually makes some rather stunning revelations about the ways in which ISPs are currently violating net neutrality/open internet principles in a way designed to block encryption and thus make everyone a lot less secure.

Comments

No Carriers

[Anonymous Coward]

They block encryption they are violating the telecommunication laws. And so they are not a carrier anymore.

Re:No Carriers

[TechyImmigrant]

Isn't the end result the same?
If a transparent proxy changes the TLS messages, it's filtering encrypted traffic so it's a MITM attack.

Still evil.

Re:No Carriers

[aztracker1]

What someone should probably come up with is something between https and http.. that being signed payloads over http... for stuff that is non critical and available via cdn, it would be nice if some of these systems could be used to cache results... the payload could be signed with the private key (used on https), and have that signature added to the header... this way signed http objects could be used via https, without the warnings... the content matches the signature.... edge caching systems can still be used (if they respect the header).. maybe use httpsd as the protocol (http + signed data) and fallback to https if there isn't a signature.

Re:No Carriers

[jc42]

They block encryption they are violating the telecommunication laws. And so they are not a carrier anymore.

If you mean "common carrier" then the truth is that they never where one.

Maybe we should be looking at the origins of the "common carrier" concept, and learn how they apply to the current situation. A number of historians have written on this topic, and the history definitely applies to our modern network.

Part of the explanation of how "common carrier" arose is in the well-known phrase "kill the messenger". Centuries ago, this was a very real problem. It wasn't unusual for a prince (or other powerful personage) to respond to the receipt of a message he didn't like by punishing the poor fellow who delivered it. The carrier services replied to this in about the only way they could: They opened and read the messages, and if they thought the recipient would react by harming their carrier, they would "edit" the message. And when dealing with a recipient who had a bad history, they'd often sell the message's content to the enemies of the sender or receiver.

Eventually the smarter princes figured out that a reliable message service was worth more than the temporary enjoyment they got from torturing or killing the messenger. So some of them got together with the message services, and worked out an agreement: If a sender and receiver had both signed on with a message company, they could send "sealed" messages, which the message carriers would promise to deliver unopened. But this would only apply if the sender and receiver had both promised not to damage the carriers employees or equipment, etc., etc.

This worked out to the advantage of the princes who joined in such agreements, so the practice spread, and became known (in English) by the phrase "common carrier".

It's easy to see how this all might apply to our current topic. The ISPs are "carriers", but not "common carriers". They have a record of opening and reading our communications, and selling the contents to "enemies" like marketers and government agencies. We're now engaged in collecting evidence about this behavior, and publishing it openly. We should make it clear that, as long as the ISPs continue acting in such perfidious ways, we will continue to work to expose their behavior to the general public, including people they views as their enemies (or "competitors";-).

The parallels to the original situation aren't exact, but we might benefit by knowing the history and trying to find a similar solution that can work today.

this could be solved by defining "internet access"

[gandhi_2]

if someone is selling "internet access" at x throughput rate.... that should mean something.
if someone wants to sell http-only access, fine. But you can't call it "internet access".

Re:this could be solved by defining "internet acce

[Shatrat]

I believe this is spot on. I also think that services stuck behind a NAT should not be sold as 'Internet' either. This seems like a perfect stick for the FCC to keep ISPs in line with. Do whatever you want, but if your product is inferior we won't let you advertise it as 'Internet'

Re:Competition urgently needed

[Anonymous Coward]

And once there is healthy competition among them, there will be no need for the rest of us to legislate every minutiae of their behavior.

Bullshit.

Once they have competition, they'll just form a cartel to collectively screw us all over.

If you think competition gets rid of the natural urge of corporations to act like assholes ... you're fucking deluded.

Human nature is such that if you decide you no longer need legislation, they'll just start doing it again.

I don't believe for a moment they're ever going to be anything except for self serving douchebags. Competition won't change that.

You guys who think the free market solves problems are pretty fucking deluded.

Re:Competition urgently needed

[atfrase]

I think this hints at the fundamental disagreement between people's thoughts on "net neutrality."

Some folks think business is business and should be able to do whatever it wants, probably because they have money or some other vested interest in the current telecommunications behemoths, so they want the maximum return on that investment no matter who gets screwed in the process.

Other folks (like you) see a problem with the current arrangement, and believe that the solution is to create more competition so that the telecom industry "regulates itself." In principle I agree, but I think that's just not possible in this case.

The rest of us believe that telecom is, was, and (for the foreseeable future) always will be a *natural* monopoly. You can't have meaningful competition for building roads and sewers and power grids, in part because those things cost so much money that it is effectively impossible for a new player to enter the market, and in part because our cities would be a mess if we had to deal with multiple parallel networks of these kinds of infrastructural utilities. Telecom has exactly the same issues; no matter how data transmission technology evolves (in the foreseeable future), be it telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber optics, or whatever is next, it will always be vastly more efficient for a single entity to install and manage that physical data network, at least at the local level. There just can not be meaningful local competition in data transmission services (which includes telephone, television, internet, etc). So the solution for telecom is exactly the same as it is for water, sewer, roads, etc: allow one entity to run it, but regulate them heavily as a public utility.

The problem we're facing now is "how to get there from here." We should have made this transition decades ago, but for a variety of reasons didn't, and so now those telecom monopolies have been allowed to remain private for too long and grow to enormous size. Wrangling them back into a public utility arrangement is the only sustainable path forward, but it will also be extremely politically difficult.

Re:Cisco ASA

[segedunum]

I can't mod you up any further, but yer, you're spot on. This is actually the default behaviour of a lot of routers. It might look like malice but in this case it could very well be complete laziness and a lack of awareness. Typical ISP in other words.

Re:this could be solved by defining "internet acce

[qbast]

When I was administrator in small ISP (about 100 customers) we solved that by monitoring rate of outgoing connections to port 25. Too many connections in 10 minutes - start blocking and call the customer to confirm if this is legit. If yes (happened exactly one time) customer got whitelisted, otherwise we would send somebody to help them with antivirus setup and cleaning up their machine. We also had transparent Squid http cache - not mandatory, but since traffic from cache was delivered at full LAN speed, almost everybody wanted it. The point is that it is possible to take care of the network without treating customers like irritating pests, it just needs a little extra effort.

Re:Competition urgently needed

[mi]

Once they have competition, they'll just form a cartel to collectively screw us all over.

Does not happen with restaurateurs, car-makers, nor even the cellular-service providers. Why would it happen with the ISPs?

I don't believe for a moment they're ever going to be anything except for self serving douchebags. Competition won't change that.

People will be looking out for themselves, that much is true. Competition, however, will make providing better service the most profitable course of action.

You guys who think the free market solves problems are pretty fucking deluded.

For all the problems with the free market, nothing humanity has tried works better...