[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: 74 Democrats sold you out to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

Corporations block Internet traffic every day.
Every millisecond.  It's a vital part of keeping the network
running.

There's a torrent of "harmful traffic" blasting from hundreds of
millions of PCs and web servers worldwide.  They're infested
with every kind of malicious software.  Over half the
PCs in people's homes worldwide are compromised.
They're organized by the hundreds of thousands into botnets.
You can rent a botnet by the hour to commit any crimes
you want.

They're sending phish spam, in hopes of stealing your
identity, your bank account, and your retirement savings.
They're guessing passwords in hopes of stealing your
email account, to send spam from it.  They're advertising
counterfeit drugs for sale through web servers they've
hijacked.  They're selling porn and mail-order brides.

There are even hobbyists who trade and collect videos recorded
in the back rows of movie theaters or ripped from DVDs,
consuming hundreds of times more bandwidth than everybody
else, and degrading the service for the normal users.
One such hobbyist forced the San Jose Peace Center off
line until we encrypted its Wifi service and blocked his
harmful traffic.  That's why there's a WEP key there now.

Everybody from *me* to Comcast and Time Warner America Online
do our best to block that crap.

If we stopped blocking harmful traffic, most email servers
worldwide would crash within a few minutes.  Enough web servers
would be compromised that most people would be unable to
use the Web, because most people are using Microsoft,
and it's vulnerable to attack by compromised web sites.


>This appears to me that the corporations would grab immense power if 
>they could "block internet traffic."

>I signed the petition.

I didn't.  Josh Silver, the promoter behind freepress.net,
may mean well, but he doesn't show much understanding of how
the Internet operates.  There *never was* "net neutrality."
Most of the Internet is private property.  It was designed
from the beginning to evade common carrier regulation, and that
aspect of the design has been successful.
It wasn't 74 congresscritters who sold us out last week,
it was thousands of city governments who granted local service
monopolies and free easements to the cable and phone
companies over the thirty years that the Internet was being
built.  This horse was gone long before the barn was built,
and now Silver wants the FCC to lock the barn door.

The FCC tested Silver's half-baked theory, and Comcast took
them to court and cleaned FCC's clock, as anyone who understands
the issues would have expected.  Even a loony-tunes Fascist
court can figure out a simple case like that one.

If they want to restore competition and guarantee fair access,
which is a much more reasonable goal than "net neutrality",
it's going to take thousands of eminent domain actions to
revoke all those easements.  That would be a good thing,
in my opinion, but it's not going to happen in a nation like
the US where property rights usually trump all other rights.

A more reasonable approach would be to create a net
"above the net", where you bypass politically motivated
network outages by going through proxy services.
That's how the Chinese and Iranians use Youtube and
Amnesty International.  If you're too lazy to find a proxy,
you didn't want to see those sites that badly.

It hasn't happened in the west
because there hasn't been much politically motivated
network interference.   There was one case where AT&T blocked
a site that criticized them.  The Internet routes around damage,
and it interprets censorship as damage.  I expect it
will just keep working that way.  Should politically motivated
web site blocking become a real problem, it will create
a market for user-friendly web proxy services, just as it has
in China, and hobbyists and entrepreneurs will build the net
above the net, a route around their damage.  I imagine that's
why AT&T and Comcast *aren't* blocking web sites they don't
like, because they don't want to stimulate the proxy business.


-Cameron in San Jose