8 ms·
And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did
by pwg 8y ago
And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law.
The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query:
SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice.
And here is the text of the statute that was written:
(ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i):
(A) by electronic communication;
(B) with a consumer's bill; or
(C) in another conspicuous manner.
Note the difference in language breadth. Bill sponsor: "via email" - text of statute: "by electronic communication".
And note clause (C): "in another conspicuous manner".
Century link is notifing by: "electronic communications" (DNS hijacking to force viewing of the page is "electronic communications") and/or by "another conspicuous manner" (it is definitely "another" and it is clearly "conspicuous" (one will not miss it)).
So, the fault here lies with the politician. He wrote a law that allowed Century link too much leeway to "do whatever they wanted to do to notify". If they were really only required to "notify ... via email or with an invoice", then clause (A) should have said "via email" and clause (C) should not have been present.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pureagave 8y agoI agree that the fault lies with the politician, but I would argue that the real issue is that they forced all ISPs to send notice to customers. If a politician wants something communicated, they can fund a public awareness program, not force it on ISPs. That fault doesn't exonerate CentryLink's action. edited to add CentryLink responsibility
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoBut given the options, it's absolutely CenturyLink's fault for choosing the option they did.
- eugeniub 8y agoRight, CenturyLink probably could have legally hijacked DNS to send this message without the law too. Tons of laws have leeway for corporations to do shitty things. It doesn't make the corporations blameless.
- pwg 8y agoAgreed, it is CL's fault for choosing the option the choose. It is the politicians fault for writing a law that was so broad that it allowed CL the potential leeway to be able to choose the awful option they selected.
- recursive 8y agoBut CL already had sufficient leeway to do this before this law was ever written. You can't legislate away bad decisions.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoTaking away their leeway to do this might not be a bad thing for a law to do...
- xxpor 8y agoPoliticians don't actually write laws, they have legislative assistants (that work for the body itself usually). I think the entire law is stupid, but how is it his fault that CL took the law and notified its customers in the most obnoxious way possible?
- jay-anderson 8y agoWriting laws feels a bit like a monkey's paw. No matter how well written a law is they often have unintended consequences or are implemented manners that weren't imagined. I don't think the bill's author/sponsor is fully to blame (they aren't guiltless either). Centurylink certain did not have to implement this requirement in the way it was done. The most depressing aspect to this is the lack competition. The author is unable to move to a competitor which did not behave this way.
- peteradio 8y agoLaws should be written specifically. It should be expected that they will go obsolete and it should be routine to expunge/replace laws as tech changes. If they meant email they should have put email.
- JohnFen 8y ago"If they meant email they should have put email." If they put email, then that would have required the use of email. That's certainly more narrow than they intended, as it would exclude other acceptable methods such as sending a physical letter, including a notice with the invoice, etc. This is 100% on CenturyLink.
- pwg 8y agoclause (B) of the statute specifically authorized "notice with the invoice" - which if the invoice were physical postal mailed, would have then included "sending a physical letter".
- jjuhl 8y agoHave you ever engaged with politicians much? I think not. What you wrote is very naive. Yes, laws should be specific, but they never will be.
- peteradio 8y agoI used the word "should" 4 times, never stating any expectation. What is naive about that? I realize how fucked is our current system of laws and lawmaking.
- jedberg 8y agoIt is generally bad practice to write laws with specific technologies listed as solutions, because then the law is easy to skirt by using another technology, or the law becomes stale as technology changes. That being said, this law already had a specific expiration date, and there was little fear that email would be an old technology by the end of this month. They should have written a better law.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago>It is generally bad practice to write laws with specific technologies listed Exactly right. This is why fax machines still exist today. There are some laws that _require_ certain documents be faxed (not emailed) to healthcare providers. If the law was worded more abstractly, they could be using email or a smartphone app now. So to me this new language makes sense, but it can open up risk to being abused. If the law is abused, the company should have it's day in court, and the courts can decide what to do.
- patrickyeon 8y agoThat's still misleading, at best, for CenturyLink to claim that the law "requires them" to do it this way. There are easier methods to provide the notice (email or with a bill), and there's nothing that could even be contsrued as encouraging them to do this DNS hijacking in the text you provided.
- kodablah 8y agoKinda changing topic, what does the law require wrt filtering? So all ISPs are required to provide harmful-to-minor filtering software? Is it pure DNS, HTTP, or based on initial TLS handshake using the domain? So it won't catch stuff on Reddit, right? And must they have their own filter lists or is there one shared across the state? Who are the arbiters determining what is harmful to minors? I would really love any links to the implementation side of this bill. The text of the bill itself is vague with words like "good faith" and "generally accepted".
- dragonwriter 8y ago> So, the fault here lies with the politician. I disagree: the claim by CenturyLink that this particularly intrusive, access blocking method is mandated is simply false. It's true that it is permitted by the state law (just as it would be permitted without any specific law on the topic at all), and even arguable that it is one means of complying with the law. (Though since the notification is not presented to some users, it's arguably not even fully compliant.) But, even if it were fully compliant with the law, it's not any lawmaker’s fault that CenturyLink chose to implement pretty much the most user-hostile method imaginable (short of, say, posting sings on its customers lawns, facing the windows of their home, illuminated with burning crosses—which would likewise be “another conspicuous manner”) to fulfill the notification requirement.
- pwg 8y ago> claim by CenturyLink that this particularly intrusive, access blocking method is mandated is simply false Agreed - also not the point I was making. > it's not any lawmaker’s fault that CenturyLink chose to implement pretty much the most user-hostile method imaginable Oh but it is the lawmaker's fault. It is the lawmaker's fault by writing a law that was so broadly worded as to allow Century Link to be able to perform this "user-hostile method" under cover of being within the wording of the law. If the law maker had written a more narrow law, and written what he actually intended, then CL using this method would have been in clear violation of the law, rather than being able to hide behind "we are permitted this method by the law".
- bashinator 8y agoIt looks to me like the use of the word "may" in the actual law lends a degree of flexibility to the implementation. A service provider *may* provide the notice [...] That does not seem like a hard requirement. Or is this a case where legalese differs from commonly-understood grammar?
- pytyper2 8y agoDepends on what the meaning of "is" is...
- KevinEldon 8y agoNonsense. CenturyLink took an open ended option and made an absolutely terrible implementation decision and then tried to blame the law.
- hodgesrm 8y agoSo what's your preferred language? Can you suggest something that covers all cases without introducing undue limitations?
- duxup 8y agoAt this point I wonder, did he write it? Or did CenturyLink?
- JohnFen 8y ago"So, the fault here lies with the politician." No. The fault lies with CenturyLink. They're the ones who decided to implement this in the most repulsive way allowed by law. The law only required notification using normal communications methods, not disruption of services. CenturyLink is the one who chose disruption of services.
- kawfey 8y agoWhy in the world was this the decision they came up with?
- JohnFen 8y agoI don't know, specifically, but I do know that I once lived in an area (not Utah) where I had to have CenturyLink as my ISP and they were terrible in just about every respect. This action seems within their normal range of behavior.
- vorticalbox 8y agoI really want to know who came up with the idea and which manager signed off on it.
- vertex-four 8y agoSome lawyer-management meeting resulted in the argument that they didn’t want customers to be able to claim they had never seen the notice, most likely.
- hannasanarion 8y agoBut the law literally says that email is sufficient notice.
- umanwizard 8y agoTo sell their filtering product.
- freeopinion 8y ago
- bhauer 8y agoFurther, and this is purely conjecture, it is possible their lawyers considered the alternative of email but decided it was too risky for reasons of uncertainty of message delivery/receipt. I can imagine being an engineer in a room of lawyers and having them ask me how can I ensure that all customers see the message. I would say that's not possible, but there are ways to maximize the likelihood it will be seen.
- anthuswilliams 8y agoThe law required CenturyLink to notify its customers and intentionally did not mandate a particular means of doing so. This is a feature, not a bug. Now, shady DNS spoofing may be one means of complying with the law (though it may violate others), but it was CenturyLink that chose this non-standard approach. They could instead have complied by sending an email, a physical letter, a messenger physically knocking on a customer's door etc., a flier hung on the doorknob, etc.
- rayiner 8y agoI don't really see this as an example of a "disconnect." It's simply the difference between talking about a law informally, and the actual formal implementation of the law. The intent of the law is clear: customers should be notified that this content exists. The implementation language reflects that. CenturyLink is simply covering its ass: many people don't use ISP-provided email addresses, so if that's all they did they would be open to criticism that they are not actually trying to achieve effective notice.
- macspoofing 8y ago>So, the fault here lies with the politician. No it isn't. Though DNS hijacking is certainly compatible with the text of this law, so is email communication. Century Link isn't stupid.
- ashelmire 8y agoCenturyLink did not go this route because they had to. I'm guessing they get a kickback for each person that signs up for software through them, so they made it as intrusive as possible.
- ta2987 8y ago> So, the fault here lies with the politician. He wrote a law that allowed Century link too much leeway to "do whatever they wanted to do to notify" What? That's a ridiculous conclusion to come to.
- dwighttk 8y agoI mean, the notification wouldn't get to anyone who used alternate DNS services, so it doesn't seem like their method is even very effective. (Ignoring how awful it is)
- mifreewil 8y agoThis is such a silly POV. Enforcing too much specifics into law is how you end up with non-nonsensical actions that are done just to comply with a law, like intrusive cookie banners on every single website. This law seems to actually be well written, other than it doesn't seem to specify any penalties for non-compliance, at least from the part of the law shown in the article. It's clear what the end goal of the law is, and gives several broad, reasonable ways to comply with the law. Century link is the ISP/tech experts here - they are the morons who chose to do DNS hihacking when they could have just as easily sent out an email or added a notice to the bill for the month.
- eitland 8y ago> Enforcing too much specifics into law is how you end up with non-nonsensical actions that are done just to comply with a law, like intrusive cookie banners on every single website. The cookie banners are probably a bad example: they were made to take advantage of a loophole in the first "cookie law". I think the intention of the first cookie law was clear as well, it just wasn't clear enough.
- acdha 8y agoImagine if it had said “written communication” and CenturyLink had chosen to block your driveway with a sign or toss a note pasted onto brick through your window. Would you be as quick to say it was the fault of the law rather than how they chose to interpret it? Laws are not source code and they assume some level of good faith interpretation because most real-world activities are complicated and change over time. If “email” was written into the law then we'd get some equally silly complaint about how they're using a system favored by old people while younger users want SMS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. notifications or that an important notice was spam-filtered. Stating “electronic communications” leaves those options open so time doesn't need to be spent revising the law later.
- otakucode 8y agoThe issue I see is also that they didn't notify the customer of what the law requires. The law requires they notify the customer that the customer can request content guessed to potentially be somehow harmful to minors be blocked. It doesn't say anything about the customer having to pay to buy software that they then have to operate themselves in order to block such content. The law, at least as far as I read it, puts the entire responsibility for blocking the content on the ISP - not the customer. So what the ISP is doing seems in direct contravention of the law.
- cmurf 8y agoThis is evidence of an industry lobby written bill.
- gameswithgo 8y agoabsent any law they would still be free to DNS hijack you and show you an ad. there is no law against that. this law says you have to notify customers of a thing. century link then did so in a shady way, then claimed the law REQUIRED them to do it this way, which is not true. why am I having to explain this?
- reaperducer 8y agoNote the difference in language breadth. Bill sponsor: "via email" - text of statute: "by electronic communication". If the law was written to specify e-mail, then the HN crowd would be all over the lawmaker anyway for specifying an antiquated communication method that not everyone uses. Since laws last generations, and technologies fall in and out of favor at the drop of a hat, the lawmaker was right in making this non-specific. It's the ISP that decided to be a jerk about it.
- olyjohn 8y agoRegardless of how the law was written, they didn't HAVE to take all the leeway that was given to them. Just because a company can do something, doesn't mean that they should. Just because it's not illegal, doesn't mean that it's okay. They found an opportunity to get people used to this sort of tactic, and they took advantage of it. Please don't take the blame off of CenturyLink.
- ajross 8y ago> So, the fault here lies with the politician. I'm sorry, what kind of ethical nonsense is that? "Bad behavior is OK as long as some authority didn't expressly disallow it" ??? CenturyLink is simply a bad actor here. They're acting in an anti-customer and anti-consumer way. Sure, we should have regulations to prevent abuse where appropriate, but you certainly can't blame the government for failing to imagine how they'd behave when faced with (let's be honest here) a bleedingly obvious and common sense notification requirement.
- maxlybbert 8y agoWhen we lived in Carson City, Nevada, I met an attorney who worked for the legislature to draft laws based on whatever idea they came up with. He was supposed to try to keep things Constitutional, decide whether to put in severability clauses, etc. All states and the federal government hire attorneys like this. So, if there’s a drafting error, it may not technically be the politician’s fault, but it’s not Comcast’s either.