Ajit Pai and the FCC Want It To Be Legal for Comcast To Block BitTorrent (theverge.com)

Nilay Patel, reporting for The Verge: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released his proposal to kill net neutrality this week, and while there's a lot to be unhappy with, it's hard not to be taken with the brazenness of his argument. Pai thinks it was a mistake for the FCC to try and stop Comcast from blocking BitTorrent in 2008, thinks all of the regulatory actions the FCC took after that to give itself the authority to prevent blocking were wrong, and wants to go back to the legal framework that allowed Comcast to block BitTorrent.

Comments

Re:Next step

[0100010001010011]

Way back in the early 2000s we figured out that's what our campus IT department was doing.

A friend of mine wrote a simple 'proxy' server that sent a fake HTTP header that the bittorrent trackers ignored. Our school's firewall thought it was a HTTP packet and let it through.

Re:Good

[mark-t]

Actually, I've always thought that a fairly good argument can be made that it is stealing... unless you are going to assert one of the following:

• 1. when the person who is supposedly "stealing" does not get the same worth out of what they stole as the person that they stole it from means that it is not stealing;
• 2 that the thing that is being "stolen" was, in the opinion of the "thief", never rightfully possessed by the person who originally had or controlled it in the first place, and thus not really stealing;
• 3. something which is intangible is unceremoniously exempt from any attempt to classify unauthorized acquisition as stealing, or;
• 4. things which other people may not deem to have any value cannot be stolen.

  Barring the above rationalizations, copyright infringement can be thought of as theft on the grounds that copyright entails an exclusive right to dictate who may copy a work. Exclusive, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, and so when a person commits copyright infringement, they are literally depriving the copyright holder of some measure of the exclusive control that the rights holder was supposed to have over that work. Obviously for any single unauthorised copy, the amount of exclusivity lost is very minor, but the cumulative effect of multiple unauthorised copies can still be substantial.

Re:Ports

[gweihir]

As more and more traffic is SSL, deep-packet-inspection is basically dead, except in enterprise environments where they can push their own CA into the clients and break the tunnel.

The whole thing is stupid. A typical sign of a clueless nil-whit trying to do policy.

Re:Next step

[gweihir]

Indeed. My university back then decided to allow all the official P2P ports, because this way they could at least shape the traffic down to a reasonable rate. They also got a legal opinion stating that they are actually not required to look at the traffic or block based on content.

Re:Next step

[rtb61]

You really do not get it, this is all about mass corporate censorship, not blocking applications, blocking you, putting you off line, silencing you. How bad will be the outcome, face not that bad at all because the fury of millions of geeks is going to scare the crap out of the entirely corrupt US government. Net Neutrality will be back pretty quick, once the Republicans realise they will go from dominating the US government to being an also ran for many years to come. Geeks and nerds are an unforgiving lot being subject to many harassments in the youth has often not left them in the best temperament and in adult life, they know their intellect puts them well ahead of others in the game of political discourse. Grind the fuckers until the beg for mercy, be brutal, be mean, let them really know how pissed off you are and forget about the idea of not voting them, what a pathetic message to send, you are going to campaign against them, actively for shits and giggles to put them on the unemployment line (no revolving doors for them when they can no longer win elections and have no public relations value, out on the collective assess). Put the fucking fear of the political wilderness into them, let it keep them awake at night. Don't forget to send that email, with a note of who you will be actively campaigning for, let them know who will be replacing them.