I did a bit more research and thinking about this. The First Amendment doesn't apply here. The government doesn't care about the artistic, persuasive, or expressive character of the works, just their function. There is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually make a gun just as there is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually hire a hitman. In cases where artistic expression or persuasion is significantly burdened, there might be an as-applied challenge on First Amendment grounds.
Is there any recognized exception to the first amendment that allows the government to prohibit the distribution of accurate information on the grounds that it's dangerous to use or misuse? If not, and they're asking for a new exception to the first amendment, the minimum we should expect is a precise description of the contours of the exception.
So how do you buy a car if no bank or financial institution is willing to do business with you? If the government is going to pass laws requiring you to do business with banks and FIs to live a normal life, surely they can't continue to allow banks and FIs to pick and choose their customers arbitrarily.
> This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
That's just being silly. Imagine a company that has three vice presidents and spends $1 billion per year. I can say that company spends "over $300 million per vice president per year". But, of course, that's nonsense because there's no sensible reason to divide the yearly cost by the number of vice presidents. They can't fire one vice president to save $300 million per year nor would it cost them $300 million to add another vice president. So what's the sense of this?
Similarly, there is simply no sensible reason to divide the energy cost by the number of transactions. Reducing the number of transactions won't reduce the energy cost and increasing the number won't increase it. The energy used by bitcoin mining and the number of bitcoin transactions performed are pretty much completely independent and there is simply no reason to divide one by the other.
I suspect that they added NewEgg to the suit because they figured that Moneual would point the finger at NewEgg if they just sued Moneual. The best way to ensure that NewEgg shows up in the courtroom to solidly place the blame on Moneual is to sue NewEgg too.
His argument would work equally to defend requiring every home builder to include a recording device in every home so that law enforcement could, with a subpeona or warrant, access the recordings to investigate crimes.
No. That's called a heckler's veto and that is completely rejected by US law. Otherwise, I could stop anyone from speaking by reacting violently to their speech.
Actually, incitement of violence is protected speech in the United States. There's a very limited subcategory of incitement that's not protected, but it's not nearly as broad as you are implying. One can, for example, say "All left handed people should be killed as soon as we know they're left handed" and that is not incitement. On the other hand, if you're surrounded by a mob of people who are likely to kill left handed people, you cannot shout, "That guy in the blue hat is left handed, get him!"
Cloudflare has made it clear that they will investigate illegal activity and shut people down for it. If by "incitement", you mean its actual legal definition, then you agree with Cloudflare's position. Or is "incitement" is code for "say things I really don't like"?
You having reason to believe they would abuse it does not matter. You can sell a hammer to someone even if you have reason to believe they might use it to harm someone. The issue is whether you intended the harm or abuse or whether you conspired with them to commit the crime.
> In the case of Hutchins, his product is by design intended to be used in a way that is always illegal, so creating it in concert with someone who intends to use the product is being part of a conspiracy to commit illegal acts.
What if a court authorized the use of the malware to gather evidence? In what way is the malware's design not perfect for that type of use too?
> If someone is selling a tool that has only illegal uses, it is pretty certain that the mind of the customer is known.
I don't think there's any such thing as "a tool that has only illegal uses", unless you're talking about something that's illegal to possess. A person might want malware to:
1) Test their skills at analyzing malware.
2) Test their own defenses against malware.
3) Perform lawful intercepts on their own equipment.
4) Analyze to fingerprint to add additional detection patterns to existing malware detection systems.
I don't think it's illegal to create malware though. That seems to be the only overt act they accuse him of in the indictment. So, assuming he did in fact write it, it will come down to whether the government can prove that he conspired to sell and distribute it based on more than just accusations from his alleged co-conspirator.
Imagine you wrote some malware and I took it from you and sold it. If I was arrested, I would offer to give up the person who created it in exchange for something. Then I'd point to you and swear up and down that I have an agreement with you, whether or not it's true.
So, the big question: Assuming he wrote the malware, other than the word of his co-conspirator (who obviously wants someone to share the blame), is there any evidence he conspired to sell it?
I don't understand why any of that is relevant. Comcast could be the worst company in the world, so what? What does that have to do with net neutrality?
Again, it is a simple fact that:
1) It is almost universally the case that a packet that flows from a content provider to an access provider costs the access provider more to handle. 2) Yet that packet benefits the two companies roughly equally. 3) Because of this, a mostly free market has resulted in content providers paying (directly or indirectly) access providers to compensate for the cost disparity.
> All of which is part and parcel of being an ISP.
Agreed. Historically, ISPs have been the beneficiaries of paid peering.
> However you didn't address my point that Comcast could have helped their situation by buying up dark fiber if nothing but to help with infrastructure like Google did.
I don't see why you think that's relevant. Comcast could be the best company in the world or the worst company in the world and it wouldn't change the fact that it's going to cost Comcast more money to carry its average packet than Netflix or Google. It's always cheaper when your endpoint is servers in dozens of datacenters than when it's routers in millions of homes.
> Also you complained specifically about what Netflix and Google did while not acknowledging Comcast could have done/can still do the exact same thing.
Comcast cannot move their customers into datacenters. Fundamentally, the only major, unavoidable difference between an access network and a service provider is that service providers can locate their endpoints in datacenters and access networks can't because their endpoints are homes and businesses. The reason access providers put their servers in datacenters is because that's much cheaper. An ISP *has* to build a municipal network, an access provider doesn't.
This is so absurdly simple and I can't understand why you refuse to acknowledge it.
It's this simple:
1) Fundamentally, providing Internet connectivity to homes and businesses costs more than providing connectivity to online services. 2) Every packet exchanged benefits both endpoints roughly equally. 3) Historically, service providers (like Netflix) have paid (directly or indirectly) to access providers (like Comcast) to compensate for this cost/benefit asymmetry. 4) Now, service providers want a better deal than a mostly free market has given them.
> Because you are advocating that Netflix -- Internet -- VPN -- Comcast is more efficient than Netflix -- Internet -- Comcast. Adding in an extra hop is more efficient to you.
How hard is this to understand: If, for example, Netflix is a Level 3 customer, then when you try to reach Netflix from Comcast, you will go through Level 3's peering with Comcast, period. If Level 3's peering with Comcast is congested, your traffic will suck. If you use a VPN, you can avoid Level 3's peering with Comcast.
It really is that simple. If you honestly don't get it, I don't know what to say.
> Your point is bemoaning how terrible things are for Comcast because they are an ISP and how Netflix has some sort of responsibility to fix Comcast's problems and lack of foresight.
It has nothing to do with how bad things are for Comcast. It's just a fact that Comcast's customers are spread out throughout cities and that means that whoever is going to serve those customers has to build a massive, sprawling network. That is the explanation for why each packet exchanged between Comcast and an access provider costs Comcast more than it costs the access provider.
> And the fact that Comcast and other ISPs actively keep out other competition through multiple means has no effect on you? For example some municipalities fed up with terrible or non-existent service have been sued to prevent them from providing Internet to their constituents.
I agree that that's a problem, but net neutrality does nothing to fix it. Again, either it regulates peering or it doesn't. If it doesn't regulate peering, it won't help because Comcast can still keep the pipes to Netflix congested unless Netflix pays it. And if it does regulate peering, then what are the proposed peering regulation rules so we can analyze if they'll provide a benefit or not? Nobody has ever explained what they'll be.
> No that's idiocy. If you go through a VPN through Comcast to get Netflix, you're still going through Comcast and Netflix. You are not avoiding congested links; you are merely adding an extra step.
Honestly, I don't know how I can reason with you if you're going to assert obvious falsehoods and accuse me of idiocy. There can be a congested link between Comcast and Netflix, and Comcast can have other links that have great bandwidth and there can be other paths into Netflix that have great bandwidth. A VPN can avoid the congested link. When a VPN providers better bandwidth than a direct connection, it's almost always because it avoids a congested link.
If I recall this specific situation correctly, it looked like this:
Comcast -> Level3 -> Netflix
The congestion was, I think, between Comcast and Level3. But Comcast has links to many other providers than Level 3. And Level 3 has links to many other providers than Netflix. If you used a VPN hosted at Sprint, your path would be:
Comcast -> Sprint -> Level3 -> Netflix
That would avoid the congested link. Comcast->Sprint was fine and Sprint->Level3 was fine.
I may be misremembering the specific details, but the concept is simple -- a VPN can avoid a congested link between providers and where a VPN providers a bandwidth improvement, that's typically why.
You didn't answer my question. If net neutrality will solve this problem, it will have to do it by regulating pair peering, since the problem was an inability to agree on paid peering. So what will the rules for paid peering be? What will the regulations be?
The main part of the attraction of net neutrality to all the supporters who don't understand it is that it is pitched to them as being simple -- just treat all traffic the same. But that won't solve the problem since the problem can also come from unequal pipes even where traffic is treated the same.
So, please, if you say net neutrality will solve the unequal pipes problem (which was the Comcast/Netflix problem), explain *how* it will solve it. What would it have done in that situation?
I am aware of all those things but I don't see how they're responsive to my point. Sure, Comcast can do other things if they want, but their customers will still cost roughly the same amount to service and some company will service them. So some company or other will be in the position Comcast is in, unless you think that people who are expensive to service shouldn't have Internet access.
The fact is still that every packet benefits Comcast and Netflix equally but costs Comcast more to carry than Netflix. Thus the market has worked out a system where Netflix (typically indirectly) pays some money that winds up going to Comcast. This system of paid peering was established in a mostly free market and has worked very well. Its opponents cite the one or two times it failed, even though all of those times worked themselves out just fine and were largely the result of one side trying to strong arm the other into an unfair advantage and then not getting it. (Which seems like a reasonable free market result to me.)
Not only do many people have only a single option, some people have no decent option at all.
I'm not objecting to rules that prevent ISPs that actually hold monopoly positions from exploiting them in ways that harm consumers. But as I've explained above, net neutrality doesn't do that. Instead it unfairly shifts costs from content providers to service providers.
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I did a bit more research and thinking about this. The First Amendment doesn't apply here. The government doesn't care about the artistic, persuasive, or expressive character of the works, just their function. There is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually make a gun just as there is no First Amendment right to speech that can actually hire a hitman. In cases where artistic expression or persuasion is significantly burdened, there might be an as-applied challenge on First Amendment grounds.
Is there any recognized exception to the first amendment that allows the government to prohibit the distribution of accurate information on the grounds that it's dangerous to use or misuse? If not, and they're asking for a new exception to the first amendment, the minimum we should expect is a precise description of the contours of the exception.
So how do you buy a car if no bank or financial institution is willing to do business with you? If the government is going to pass laws requiring you to do business with banks and FIs to live a normal life, surely they can't continue to allow banks and FIs to pick and choose their customers arbitrarily.
> This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
That's just being silly. Imagine a company that has three vice presidents and spends $1 billion per year. I can say that company spends "over $300 million per vice president per year". But, of course, that's nonsense because there's no sensible reason to divide the yearly cost by the number of vice presidents. They can't fire one vice president to save $300 million per year nor would it cost them $300 million to add another vice president. So what's the sense of this?
Similarly, there is simply no sensible reason to divide the energy cost by the number of transactions. Reducing the number of transactions won't reduce the energy cost and increasing the number won't increase it. The energy used by bitcoin mining and the number of bitcoin transactions performed are pretty much completely independent and there is simply no reason to divide one by the other.
I suspect that they added NewEgg to the suit because they figured that Moneual would point the finger at NewEgg if they just sued Moneual. The best way to ensure that NewEgg shows up in the courtroom to solidly place the blame on Moneual is to sue NewEgg too.
His argument would work equally to defend requiring every home builder to include a recording device in every home so that law enforcement could, with a subpeona or warrant, access the recordings to investigate crimes.
Is deliberately misleading people free speech? Absolutely.
Is speech whose primary purpose is to solicit a commercial transaction generally accepted as an exception to free speech? Yes.
Is fraud speech? No, but misleading speech is just one element of fraud.
No. That's called a heckler's veto and that is completely rejected by US law. Otherwise, I could stop anyone from speaking by reacting violently to their speech.
Actually, incitement of violence is protected speech in the United States. There's a very limited subcategory of incitement that's not protected, but it's not nearly as broad as you are implying. One can, for example, say "All left handed people should be killed as soon as we know they're left handed" and that is not incitement. On the other hand, if you're surrounded by a mob of people who are likely to kill left handed people, you cannot shout, "That guy in the blue hat is left handed, get him!"
So then net neutrality isn't a free speech issue either, right?
Cloudflare has made it clear that they will investigate illegal activity and shut people down for it. If by "incitement", you mean its actual legal definition, then you agree with Cloudflare's position. Or is "incitement" is code for "say things I really don't like"?
Nothing you said contradicts anything that I said.
You having reason to believe they would abuse it does not matter. You can sell a hammer to someone even if you have reason to believe they might use it to harm someone. The issue is whether you intended the harm or abuse or whether you conspired with them to commit the crime.
> In the case of Hutchins, his product is by design intended to be used in a way that is always illegal, so creating it in concert with someone who intends to use the product is being part of a conspiracy to commit illegal acts.
What if a court authorized the use of the malware to gather evidence? In what way is the malware's design not perfect for that type of use too?
> If someone is selling a tool that has only illegal uses, it is pretty certain that the mind of the customer is known.
I don't think there's any such thing as "a tool that has only illegal uses", unless you're talking about something that's illegal to possess. A person might want malware to:
1) Test their skills at analyzing malware.
2) Test their own defenses against malware.
3) Perform lawful intercepts on their own equipment.
4) Analyze to fingerprint to add additional detection patterns to existing malware detection systems.
5) Own for bragging rights.
6) Use by law enforcement pursuant to a warrant.
I don't think it's illegal to create malware though. That seems to be the only overt act they accuse him of in the indictment. So, assuming he did in fact write it, it will come down to whether the government can prove that he conspired to sell and distribute it based on more than just accusations from his alleged co-conspirator.
Imagine you wrote some malware and I took it from you and sold it. If I was arrested, I would offer to give up the person who created it in exchange for something. Then I'd point to you and swear up and down that I have an agreement with you, whether or not it's true.
So, the big question: Assuming he wrote the malware, other than the word of his co-conspirator (who obviously wants someone to share the blame), is there any evidence he conspired to sell it?
I don't understand why any of that is relevant. Comcast could be the worst company in the world, so what? What does that have to do with net neutrality?
Again, it is a simple fact that:
1) It is almost universally the case that a packet that flows from a content provider to an access provider costs the access provider more to handle.
2) Yet that packet benefits the two companies roughly equally.
3) Because of this, a mostly free market has resulted in content providers paying (directly or indirectly) access providers to compensate for the cost disparity.
Do you agree with those three things or not?
> All of which is part and parcel of being an ISP.
Agreed. Historically, ISPs have been the beneficiaries of paid peering.
> However you didn't address my point that Comcast could have helped their situation by buying up dark fiber if nothing but to help with infrastructure like Google did.
I don't see why you think that's relevant. Comcast could be the best company in the world or the worst company in the world and it wouldn't change the fact that it's going to cost Comcast more money to carry its average packet than Netflix or Google. It's always cheaper when your endpoint is servers in dozens of datacenters than when it's routers in millions of homes.
> Also you complained specifically about what Netflix and Google did while not acknowledging Comcast could have done/can still do the exact same thing.
Comcast cannot move their customers into datacenters. Fundamentally, the only major, unavoidable difference between an access network and a service provider is that service providers can locate their endpoints in datacenters and access networks can't because their endpoints are homes and businesses. The reason access providers put their servers in datacenters is because that's much cheaper. An ISP *has* to build a municipal network, an access provider doesn't.
This is so absurdly simple and I can't understand why you refuse to acknowledge it.
It's this simple:
1) Fundamentally, providing Internet connectivity to homes and businesses costs more than providing connectivity to online services.
2) Every packet exchanged benefits both endpoints roughly equally.
3) Historically, service providers (like Netflix) have paid (directly or indirectly) to access providers (like Comcast) to compensate for this cost/benefit asymmetry.
4) Now, service providers want a better deal than a mostly free market has given them.
> Because you are advocating that Netflix -- Internet -- VPN -- Comcast is more efficient than Netflix -- Internet -- Comcast. Adding in an extra hop is more efficient to you.
How hard is this to understand: If, for example, Netflix is a Level 3 customer, then when you try to reach Netflix from Comcast, you will go through Level 3's peering with Comcast, period. If Level 3's peering with Comcast is congested, your traffic will suck. If you use a VPN, you can avoid Level 3's peering with Comcast.
It really is that simple. If you honestly don't get it, I don't know what to say.
> Your point is bemoaning how terrible things are for Comcast because they are an ISP and how Netflix has some sort of responsibility to fix Comcast's problems and lack of foresight.
It has nothing to do with how bad things are for Comcast. It's just a fact that Comcast's customers are spread out throughout cities and that means that whoever is going to serve those customers has to build a massive, sprawling network. That is the explanation for why each packet exchanged between Comcast and an access provider costs Comcast more than it costs the access provider.
> And the fact that Comcast and other ISPs actively keep out other competition through multiple means has no effect on you? For example some municipalities fed up with terrible or non-existent service have been sued to prevent them from providing Internet to their constituents.
I agree that that's a problem, but net neutrality does nothing to fix it. Again, either it regulates peering or it doesn't. If it doesn't regulate peering, it won't help because Comcast can still keep the pipes to Netflix congested unless Netflix pays it. And if it does regulate peering, then what are the proposed peering regulation rules so we can analyze if they'll provide a benefit or not? Nobody has ever explained what they'll be.
> No that's idiocy. If you go through a VPN through Comcast to get Netflix, you're still going through Comcast and Netflix. You are not avoiding congested links; you are merely adding an extra step.
Honestly, I don't know how I can reason with you if you're going to assert obvious falsehoods and accuse me of idiocy. There can be a congested link between Comcast and Netflix, and Comcast can have other links that have great bandwidth and there can be other paths into Netflix that have great bandwidth. A VPN can avoid the congested link. When a VPN providers better bandwidth than a direct connection, it's almost always because it avoids a congested link.
If I recall this specific situation correctly, it looked like this:
Comcast -> Level3 -> Netflix
The congestion was, I think, between Comcast and Level3. But Comcast has links to many other providers than Level 3. And Level 3 has links to many other providers than Netflix. If you used a VPN hosted at Sprint, your path would be:
Comcast -> Sprint -> Level3 -> Netflix
That would avoid the congested link. Comcast->Sprint was fine and Sprint->Level3 was fine.
I may be misremembering the specific details, but the concept is simple -- a VPN can avoid a congested link between providers and where a VPN providers a bandwidth improvement, that's typically why.
You didn't answer my question. If net neutrality will solve this problem, it will have to do it by regulating pair peering, since the problem was an inability to agree on paid peering. So what will the rules for paid peering be? What will the regulations be?
The main part of the attraction of net neutrality to all the supporters who don't understand it is that it is pitched to them as being simple -- just treat all traffic the same. But that won't solve the problem since the problem can also come from unequal pipes even where traffic is treated the same.
So, please, if you say net neutrality will solve the unequal pipes problem (which was the Comcast/Netflix problem), explain *how* it will solve it. What would it have done in that situation?
I am aware of all those things but I don't see how they're responsive to my point. Sure, Comcast can do other things if they want, but their customers will still cost roughly the same amount to service and some company will service them. So some company or other will be in the position Comcast is in, unless you think that people who are expensive to service shouldn't have Internet access.
The fact is still that every packet benefits Comcast and Netflix equally but costs Comcast more to carry than Netflix. Thus the market has worked out a system where Netflix (typically indirectly) pays some money that winds up going to Comcast. This system of paid peering was established in a mostly free market and has worked very well. Its opponents cite the one or two times it failed, even though all of those times worked themselves out just fine and were largely the result of one side trying to strong arm the other into an unfair advantage and then not getting it. (Which seems like a reasonable free market result to me.)
1) The law isn't in effect yet, so it hasn't prevented anything.
2) It is well known who I am. I work for a company that is neither an ISP or a content provider.
3) I do remember the Comcast/Netflix scandal. It's one of very, very few examples where the system broke down. The market sorted it out.
4) It is interesting how you are unable to presume good faith when people disagree with you, even when they present reasoned arguments.
Not only do many people have only a single option, some people have no decent option at all.
I'm not objecting to rules that prevent ISPs that actually hold monopoly positions from exploiting them in ways that harm consumers. But as I've explained above, net neutrality doesn't do that. Instead it unfairly shifts costs from content providers to service providers.