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Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other 'Pirate' Sites (torrentfreak.com)
Several Pirate Bay users from ISPs all over the world have been unable to access their favorite torrent site for more than a week. Their requests are being stopped in the Internet backbone network of Cogent Communications, which has blackholed the CloudFlare IP-address of The Pirate Bay and many other torrent and streaming sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: When the average Internet user types in a domain name, a request is sent through a series of networks before it finally reaches the server of the website. This also applies to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites such as Primewire, Movie4k, TorrentProject and TorrentButler. However, for more than a week now the US-based backbone provider Cogent has stopped passing on traffic to these sites. The sites in question all use CloudFlare, which assigned them the public IP-addresses 104.31.18.30 and 104.31.19.30. While this can be reached just fine by most people, users attempting to pass requests through Cogent's network are unable to access them.
Thus begins the breakup of the free and open internet. No matter what you think of Pirate Bay.
Someone puts a chain and lock across the front door of a business. But the place has a backdoor down a poorly lit alley that is still open and accessible, so IF PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT AND KNOW HOW TO GET THERE they can still get in. Do you think the blocked front door will cause some, maybe most, visitors to go away instead of looking for another way in?
If they start blackholing IP ranges just because of "infringing content", it's not much more to assume that they will start blackholing VPN providers, porn, non-backdoored services, inconvenient "alternate facts", the competition of their corporate friends, "undesirables", or indeed anything else that they want to. Best part of all is, it's all the blocking they could ever want, and it's not the government doing it but a private company. So there's no threat of lawsuit to reverse the policy as it's not a first amendment violation.
The citizenry needs a decentralized network NOW if we are to preserve freedom of expression, and association on the net. Guess we could start adhocing the APs, that would be a start. (Better yet someone produce an AP gateway that routes traffic to other gateways. With a passthrough for the central net if it can't find the destination on the citizen net.)
Filtering on your own end is fine for security purposes, but we can't have peering broken or else the whole thing just won't work.
This is more like the road leading to the store being dynamited. Cogent should loose its common carrier status since they are now exerting editorial control over the contents of their network. Let them be liable for all copyright infringement they happen to route.
You're not looking at the Big Picture. If any backbone provider can unilaterally decide to disallow arbitrary traffic to traverse their network, then the Internet as a whole can become profoundly broken in no time. This sort of behavior sets a dangerous precedent for behavior for network providers at all levels. If you've ever been afraid of the Internet being broken up into 'walled gardens', then you should be afraid now, because moves like this from Cogent may set the tone for the future, emboldening other companies to take similar actions for whatever reasons suit them. This goes beyond frivolous things like, for instance, Comcast/Xfinity deciding to slow (or block) Hulu traffic because they offer their own streaming video service; what if, say, Wells Fargo Bank decides to pay a large ISP to slow (or block completely) access through their network to all Credit Unions? You might say "well, I'll just get a different ISP", but many people have no other choice of ISP. Since Comcast/Xfinity is a business, it can do whatever it wants. If there's no Net Neutrality regulation, then there's nothing to stop them. This is just one example; do you see the problem now?