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Well allow me to retort. This article is saying, basically, that the tendency of ISPs to try to monetize user data is a natural consequence of capitalism, and

• LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  You're absolutely right that a broad regulatory solution would be a good thing - but we shouldn't ignore a technical solution when it's available. By analogy, we have pretty good regulations about the contents of your home not being stolen. But you should still lock your doors when you leave.
• dkhenry 10y ago
  I think you missed the authors real point. The selling of data isn't the policy you need to fight. The monopoly power of ISP's is the problem you must push back on. The author has rightly pointed out that regulating your way to your goal is not a solution. He is advocating for a free market solution which is much more robust then one that hinges on the right people being in power for all eternity.
  • falcolas 10y ago
    This, and the original article, makes the assumption that your ISP continues to transfer your VPN encrypted bits with the same priority that it transfers your HTTP and HTTPS bits. There's nothing that says this will be the case. It would be very simple to deprioritize VPN connections, and recommend an upgrade to their "business" ISP plan if you need your VPN connection prioritized. They have no reason not to, and every reason to. Either way, they get more money out of your existing internet use. It would be a pyrrhic victory at best; they wouldn't be spying on you, but you're paying twice more for that "right".
  • dreamcompiler 10y ago
    Completely agree. Monopolies are the problem. Capitalism is a delicate system and, unregulated, it leads to monopolies. That's why capitalism needs regulation -- not to pick winners, but to ensure healthy competition. This is something Republicans seem to be willfully obtuse about. Capitalism without regulation is like a football game without referees.
    • skylan_q 10y ago
      But we live in a world with regulatory capture. Regulations make it easier/better for corporations, not the employees or consumers.
    • platz 10y ago
      The counterpoint is, if The monopoly power of ISPs are the real problem, VPNs don't do anything to stop the monopoly power of ISPs. VPNs are a strategy for mitigating an individual's exposure—leaving the monopoly of the ISP intact.
      • dreamcompiler 10y ago
        Yes, ISP monopolies are still a problem w.r.t. price and quality of service. But VPNs stop the ability of ISPs to snoop on and sell your data, which -- in a perfect world with ISP competition -- market forces would prevent. So VPNs can take the place of market forces for one of the bad things that arise with ISP monopolies, namely the one that the House just enabled yesterday.
        • dragonwriter 10y ago
          VPNs do that so long as ISPs don't inhibit, block, deprioritize, or charge extra for traffic that isn't over known protocols that they can mine for salable data; which, given that the same political actors that oppose the FCCs Privacy Report and Order also oppose the Open Internet Report and Order that prohibits that action means that VPNs may not long be an effective mitigation of the policy problem, because of an intimately linked policy problem.
  • mundo 10y ago
    That was most certainly not the author's main point; he only mentioned it briefly, and he didn't mention a way to fight monopolies. To be sure, when the "Make Network Monopolies Not Exist Somehow Act of 20xx" is up for a vote, I'll probably be for it. But that's not what this article is about.
  • fragmede 10y ago
    I depend on many things that hinge on the right people being in power for all eternity, and so do you. We've seen what the wrong people in power do. Mussolini, Stalin and his gulags, Pol Pot and his genocides, Kim Jong-il, Slobodan Milošević. This isn't a statement about the current US President, but we depend on having right (enough) people in power in a lot more ways than this one policy decision.
  • flatline 10y ago
    So, on the one hand we can have effective legislation right now over reasonably well-defined privacy concerns. On the other hand, we can work for a decade to introduce regulation over the hard-to-define concept of an ISP monopoly, and then spend more decades going through the inevitable break-up and re-conglomeration of these entities under different forms, like we had with the telcos through the last half of the 20th century. In 50 years we may have a landscape that resembles that of the current cellular carriers: three or four large players in most metro areas, fewer rural options, and little real choice among them in terms of QoS or T&C. I suppose this would represent a slight improvement over the status quo? This is the problem with so many free-market proposals, they would have you off tilting at windmills instead of directly addressing a fairly straightforward problem.
  • pera 10y ago
    Quoting the article: > [...] stop relying on governments for self-protection that you can handle yourself. If it’s not the current administration that will repeal our protections, it will be the next one. And what then? The whole point of a democratic government is to protect the interest of the majority of their citizens, and the selling of personal personal data is clearly against the interest of most Americans. In a democracy the tool we have to protect our interests is the law. Unfortunately this tool sometimes is also used by small but powerful actors for their own purposes, colliding with the will of the majority. That's exactly when we have to fight back to keep the government democratic. VPNs can be used as a temporary workaround by some people, but it's definitively not a good permanent fix for this constant invasion of privacy that many corporations in the US are so willing to attain. Even if you think you have a perfect technical solution (GNUnet? Tor? I2P?) the next administration can simply say that solution is unlawful, and what then? The fact is, sometimes we have to demand our government to do the right thing, and this now is one of those times.
    • Zigurd 10y ago
      It's evident from previous examples that it's a significant increment from legalizing a bad practice, that is anyway going to be done by law enforcement and other government organs, and by stealth even if it was illegal, to making software or protocols contraband.
    • int_19h 10y ago
      This argument is the central one in the article, and it's really weird, because it could be seemingly applied to any government regulation, or, indeed, any useful service provided by the government. Once you notice that, the whole piece is basically just ancap apologetics.
    • michaelmrose 10y ago
      You are right indeed if we abandon the law as a tool to protect ourselves and decide to go it alone not only will this surely leave the confused majority in the dust unprotected it provides no protection against future encroachment. Whats to stop them from banning consumer vpns or requiring registration and some sort of key escrow system whereby the key to your vpn is held by the government, your isp, and eventually your competitors/hackers after they steal it.
  • unethical_ban 10y ago
    There won't be a free market solution to land-based ISPs. After the government broke the telcos up, they just consolidated again. Now we have less than half-dozen large ISPs, and states are trying to ban local governments from creating co-ops! Maybe one or two entrants will come in (google Fiber, who stopped expanding), and only then, it will be from GOVERNMENT enforcing free use of easements. Certain industries have a tendency to be monopolistic, or else have incredibly high barriers to entry. ISPs should be regulated to protect customer privacy. This is the equivalent of USPS, the public library, and the phone company selling your data to whoever wants it, and it's wrong.
    • pyre 10y ago
      While not 100% 'free market,' I think that turning things like last mile lines, etc in to a public utility (allowing many ISPs to hook into them), and abolishing local government-granted monopolies is the real solution here. While abolishing the government-grants of monopoly status is unquestionably free-market, turning the last-mile lines into a public utility is slightly less so. But this move would effectively force the playing field to level a bit. If you wanted to make it slightly less "government-y," you could just establish rules that those running the last-mile lines, and those providing the connectivity must be separate entities (and not connected to each other like some "spin it off as a separate division of Comcast but they are still parts of / owned by the same company"-type deal) so that everyone gets a fair shake. [ That said, I'm not in favour of letting the privacy war play out in the market, because I'm not 100% sure that the market wouldn't just settle into a state where everyone was doing something I don't like to some extent. ]
      • techsupporter 10y ago
        It's funny that you (and many others) say this because we had this from 1996 to roughly 2004. Unbundled last element, or linesharing, was a requirement of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Telcos loathed it and pitched many mighty fits and threw every (physical and metaphorical) wrench they could in front of their brand new competitors. But it worked, in spite of the problems[0]. The absolute best I ever had was in Southwestern Bell territory. Over a single copper circuit I could choose from TEN different ISPs. Speakeasy, Megapath, Covad Direct, August Net, and a handful more that I can't remember. In 2002, I paid Speakeasy $160/month for 10mbps symmetrical with 8 real IP addresses and no port blocking. President Bush was elected and the telcos' complaints were given new life at the new FCC. The unbundling requirements were swiftly removed. Now, we have this. 0 - And don't get me wrong, the problems were legion. UNE-P didn't apply to cable providers nor the new-ish fiber optic last mile buildouts. Only ILECs were subject to it so competitive providers who had built physical plants got to skate by. And there were some legitimate complaints over the "profit margin" calculation (in quotes because what's a margin in the telco business, really?). But, damn, it did work for a brief time...
  • wvenable 10y ago
    I disagree. I mean you make a good point, the monopoly power of ISPs is a problem. But even if you solve that, that doesn't mean you solve the privacy issue. You can have dozens of ISPs and even if half of them sell your data that's still a problem. And it simply won't be enough of a factor for the free market to correct.
  • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    And what if ISPs start banning VPNs in their TOS? What's the market based solution to that? It seems odd to reject regulating against certain practices and reject the breakup of monopolies as well. Without a market that works properly many more specific practices are going to have to be banned. That's not an ideal situation. Monopolies are indeed the main problem here. Also, VPNs seem to be under attack from governments, so I wouldn't rely that option being available forever either.
    • ams6110 10y ago
      If ISPs ban VPNs, the people who want to use VPNs will cancel their service. If enough people want to use VPNs the ISPs will be forced to allow it.
      • fauigerzigerk 10y ago
        Right, and once everyone is used to life without internet let's go all the way back to a hunter-gatherer life so we're safe from extortionist practices made possible by other entrenched oligopolies that defeat market mechanisms. I have to wonder why government regulation is to be avoided at all cost when it comes to consumer protection whilst the very existence of corporations, their property rights and hence markets themselves is owed entirely to government regulation. I am very much in favor of using market mechanisms to solve as many problems as we can, because if and when markets work they solve a very complex coordination problem that is extremely hard to replace with planning. But to claim that markets can solve every problem including their own dysfunction is just logically nonsensical.
  • amluto 10y ago
    > The author has rightly pointed out that regulating your way to your goal is not a solution. He is advocating for a free market solution which is much more robust then one that hinges on the right people being in power for all eternity. Then the author should go all out and suggest that the federal government completely deregulate all the spectrum from, say, 500 MHz to 1 GHz. We'll have lots of wireless providers, and none of them will work well because they'll all interfere with each other. There's a variant that might work, though: force the licensees to operate on a wholesale basis only. No Internet, no voice, no SMS, no phone number, no streaming NFL games, purely connectivity to a wholesale backend provider that can provide whatever services they like using whatever peering, transit, CDN, etc relationships they want. As a practical matter, it would probably work better to let the spectrum licensees provide voice and SMS, just because the protocols are so absurdly complicated that it might be very hard to get it to work wholesale. (As an aside, public utility regulators could do the same thing for wired services. Let one provider supply every property in an area with a 10Gbps point-to-point fiber link to a nearby datacenter. Anyone else can lease space in the data center and cross-connect to residents' fibers.)
  • m3ta 10y ago
    It's not only a free-market solution, it's also the solution that doesn't involve giving your ISP plaintext data and trusting them to do nothing wrong with it because the government said so.
  • manigandham 10y ago
    > regulating your way to your goal is not a solution Why not? Author didnt say much at all about this. What else is regulation for if not to keep certain things in check better than the free market/people/whatever can do?
    • rqebmm 10y ago
      Right. People forget that there is no such thing as a truly "free" market. Literally everything we consider a "market" has regulations, from contract enforcement to currency standardization to abolishing violence and theft as market forces.
  • michaelmrose 10y ago
    Pure free market solutions are nearly always worthless by themselves there is always misaligned intensives in every transaction move complicated than selling a can of soup. Where incentives are misaligned and/or the issue is a technical/complex and users are highly unlikely to vote with their dollars regulation is the only possible achieve success.
  • cbsmith 10y ago
    Often the easiest way to solve these kinds of problems is actually to have a well regulated monopoly.
  • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    > He is advocating for a free market solution which is much more robust then one that hinges on the right people being in power for all eternity. Unfortunately, in the real world, history teaches us that free markets will absolutely go to hell in a handbasket if the wrong people are in power even for a short time. So much for ivory tower "free market" idealism.
• problems 10y ago
  It's a lot easier to see many pollution problems and the harm often is more direct and quantifiable - with a privacy issue the harm is often abstract and harder to see. I think privacy and pollution regulations can be good, but they need to be carefully tracked and aren't always effective. The best solution for you is always to be a vigilant consumer. Something like this can be protected entirely by doing so. Pollution is harder to defend against. Using a VPN is a great strategy to mitigate these issues before they're allowed to happen to you.
• asimpletune 10y ago
  I think what the author saying is incredibly valid and the pollution example doesn't exactly equate. Ideally, you wouldn't rely on trust, i.e. Policy, you would rely on math. As far as we know, judging from the Wikileaks releases, encryption still works. With pollution, it is a policy issue, because there's no mathematical way to prevent polluters. So we have to negotiate amongst lawmakers, regular people, and corporations. I think what the author is saying here is that we shouldn't bet our privacy and safety on who is in charge, as we are always one flick of the pen away from losing those protections. I think this is especially the case when there is a mathematical solution to the problem, that doesn't require trust. Obviously, having math and policy would be an added bonus.
  • skylan_q 10y ago
    Pollution is currently a negative externality while your own private data being sold is not.
  • mundo 10y ago
    Pollution and privacy are just two examples of cases where we use regulatory laws to curb the natural tendency of for-profit corporations successfully. That the regulations are implemented differently isn't very relevant; they're both regulations that a) shouldn't be relied on according to the article's rationale, but b) have proven effective in the real world. > I think what the author is saying here is that we shouldn't bet our privacy and safety on who is in charge, as we are always one flick of the pen away from losing those protections. Yes, and what I'm saying is that the same is true of every other regulation, which is why it's not a compelling argument against this one. You may have noticed that the same Congress currently gutting privacy protections is also gutting air quality protections...
    • asimpletune 10y ago
      Sorry, I'm not sure I totally follow your thesis. I think what you're trying to say is that the right thing to do is for privacy to be protected by the legal system, right? Then I think you're analogy to support that is how we have regulations around pollution. So, on this point I agree. We should live in a world where lawmakers protect privacy and the environment, and the fact that they don't is disappointing and a short term (hopefully not long term) failure of government. So far we are in agreement. In addition to that, I think what I'm trying to add is that VPNs are absolutely a way to mitigate the need for lawmakers to do the right thing, a concept in the abstract we all agree on but in reality proves to be very difficult. I'm not sure you're disagreeing with that point or if you think they're mutually exclusive, maybe you can clarify. To go with your analogy about water filters being a substitution for having protection for keeping water clean. No, of course I don't think it's an effective substitute, but I'm still going to filter my water in addition to demanding that adequate protection is put in place. So hopefully we are in agreement on that point as well, as they're not mutually exclusive. But the overall, larger point to be made is we should just always do what we can. So voting is one thing, among other avenues within the process of government, however I'm also going to use a VPN, because, damn it, it works. One last thing I'd like to say from another comment that I wrote somewhere else in here is that hopefully this will be an impetus for full decentralization the internet further, because an ideal solution would be to make it logistically intractable to snoop. A distributed internet, similar to how it was originally envisioned.
• matthewaveryusa 10y ago
  I find the outrage rather interesting. Google and Facebook are basically everywhere sniffing as much data as they can. I actually don't mind if another party starts collecting the data as well. Go nuts. Google is already toying with the idea of creating VPNs for consumers. In the case of the pixel it's legit because they allow you to opt-in to VPNing to google servers on untrusted WIFI connections. The irony is that now google has even more data on you. Once your VPN exits, you can still get MitMed/injected on non-TLS resources, so what is the VPN really doing for you? The only thing the VPN does is control which party will spy on you. The blind lead the blind I guess.
  • tpm 10y ago
    You can easily avoid facebook by not registering there and blocking requests to their servers from other sites. Similarly with google, though you can't use Chrome and Android in that case. There is no easy and free way to avoid your ISP spying on you.
  • ballenf 10y ago
    Maybe I don't understand DNS well enough, but I assume all the tech sites that recommend everyone change their DNS servers to google's 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 understand that Google is heavily data mining and monetizing every lookup. And the FCC has never attempted to regulate that level of privacy.
    • eric_the_read 10y ago
      If you're curious, Google is quite open about what and how they log from their DNS services: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy So they don't track personally-identifiable information directly; it's certainly possible you could de-anonymize someone from their dataset, but most of what they do track is on their end (what machine handled the request, how quickly, etc.)
      • dnautics 10y ago
        The thing is, let's say Google reneged on their promises and started violating privacy on 8.8.8.8 - would it be up to the FCC to enforce that or the FTC to enforce it as fraudulent behavior?
• zpallin 10y ago
  Came here to say exactly this. We are all engineers and can understand the concept of a patch versus a refactor. Yes, a refactor may be harder, but there is never an excuse to rely indefinitely on a patch; that's how you get burned with technical debt. The government needs to change to be more responsive to the people and not constantly sell them out at the flick of a pen. Yes, use a VPN! But don't buy the message that there isn't more that can be done. There is, and many people are working tirelessly to see it through. Don't ignore or devalue their efforts to make a better system for people.
• ianopolous 10y ago
  I think the key difference is selling one person's internet history mostly only affects that person's privacy. The environment on the other hand is a common good, and any damage to it hurts everyone. Similarly, someone taking heroin doesn't only hurt themselves, they are likely to hurt people around them as well.
  • mundo 10y ago
    You can't see a downside to living in a world in which you personally have protected your privacy, but society generally has given up on it?
    • ianopolous 10y ago
      I definitely see downsides, but I think the sad fact is that most people don't care. If it also makes their internet cheaper, even fewer will care.
• gregschlom 10y ago
  Your analogies don't hold up. Buying water filters doesn't do anything to the polluting party. They can just keep polluting. On the other hand, using a VPN makes your data worthless. It allows you to directly hit back at the companies trying to monetize your data. It's entirely different that just avoiding the problem.
  • heurist 10y ago
    Only techies will be setting up VPNs. What about the vast majority of everyone else who don't understand what is happening when they connect to the internet?
    • saint_fiasco 10y ago
      Considering the whole point of selling user data is that advertisers want to profile you, using a VPN just lets the ISPs tell the advertisers "this guy is a techie, send him ads for computer stuff".
  • wvenable 10y ago
    Ultimately you're limiting your own connection. How exactly is the entire country going to use VPNs and get reasonable performance? It's not a long term solution.
  • mundo 10y ago
    I didn't say that privacy and pollution were similar in any way except that the line of reasoning presented in the article would apply to regulations policing both of them (and many others, and is hence over-broad).
• necessity 10y ago
  Your comparison is nonsensical. Pollution is a violation of a shared resource, and can even be an aggression to someone's property. Even the most libertarian minded individual will make a case against it, see for instance Rothbard[1]. Selling user supplied data to advertisers is exactly what Google and Facebook do. The problem is that there is a monopoly in the ISP business. You can use Searx, Startpage, DDG, or other privacy-focused solutions instead of Google directly, and Facebook is really superfluous, if you don't want don't use it, or just create a fake profile. When it comes to ISPs you don't really have a choice if they all decide to turtle up and do the same (the freer the market the greater the incentive to one of them to turn or for another to start in business by answering to the demand for a more private browsing experience, even if locally at a certain city at first). [1] "The eruption of Mt. St. Helens should have alerted everyone to the ever-present processes of natural pollution (...) In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor (...) such aggression may take the form of pollution of someone else's air, including his owned effective airspace, injury against his person, or a nuisance interfering with his possession or use of his land (...) this is the case, provided that (...) while visible pollutants or noxious odors are per se aggression, in the case of invisible and insensible pollutants the plaintiff must prove actual harm; the burden of proof of such aggression rests upon the plaintiff; the plaintiff must prove strict causality from the actions of the defendant to the victimization of the plaintiff; the plaintiff must prove such causality and aggression beyond a reasonable doubt; and there is no vicarious liability, but only liability for those who actually commit the deed." https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollution https://mises.org/library/law-property-rights-and-air-pollut...
  • mattmanser 10y ago
    You say his argument is nonsensical, but then make exactly the same argument as him by calling it a public utility.
  • tzs 10y ago
    Rothbard's approach to pollution in many cases does reduce down to "tough...buy a filter if you want clean air/water", due to his requirement that the plaintiff prove strict causality, and in the case of invisible pollutants prove actual harm. When you find, for example, your crops damaged by acid rain, that acid rain can have been caused by pollutants releases hundreds or even thousands of miles away, from hundreds of sources. Who do you sue? It's generally not going to be possible to prove that the pollution emitted by any particular source ended up in the rain that fell on your crops.
• cmurf 10y ago
  The article didn't use the term, but it's basically arguing there are such things as natural monopolies, and that ISPs are examples of them. Fighting monopolies is an argument for more aggressive application of competition law, to break up monopolies, and disallow anti-competitive conglomeration. But again the article doesn't bring up anti-trust. The article also doesn't account for the fact that an ISP, without net neutrality regulation, can block or throttle or charge extra, for VPN usage.
• ruleabidinguser 10y ago
  This is the wrong argument, but the right point.
• rqebmm 10y ago
  Allow me to followup in support: I work for a private VPN company (that coincidentally used to be a dial-up ISP), and the owner/leadership is very active in lobbying state and federal legislatures to pass privacy-oriented legislation. In other words: someone who's worked for decades on both sides of the issue acknowledges that legislation is the best solution. https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/category/policy https://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/category/policy
• nu2ycombinator 10y ago
  I am trying to understand here, what more information ISPs can get other than they have access now? Does this policy let them do man middle attack? Can they access my SSL internet data too?
• r00fus 10y ago
  Speaking about pollution, we should definitely create a way to pollute web traffic. When the enemy has heat-seeking technology, we have to start using chaff/ECM. VPNs are a tool, but it's easier for users to install a plugin that pollutes their data than to enable VPN.
  • Balgair 10y ago
    https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-...
• Romanulus 10y ago
  ... wait, there's an incentive for corporations to pollute? I think 'The Tragedy of the Commons' is a better explanation for that, but I see what you're driving at.
• xvolter 10y ago
  I had to write a more extensive response to the OP, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998898 https://medium.com/@ben.hutchins/what-youre-revealing-to-your-isp-why-a-vpn-isn-t-enough-and-ways-to-avoid-leaking-it-503816542951 https://medium.com/@ben.hutchins/what-youre-revealing-to-you... I think this ignores article too much about what is actually at risk, regardless of whether a VPN is a viable solution for some.