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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.
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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
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.