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It's worth pointing out that society is shifting HARD on the idea that pipe service providers should be "neutral" with respect to the traffic they're carrying.

It's worth pointing out that society is shifting HARD on the idea that pipe service providers should be "neutral" with respect to the traffic they're carrying. Recent pushes around scam calls and texts have resulted in policies with providers to more heavily screen their customers from the start, requirements for text campaigns to submit their content for review, internal evaluation of traffic for fraud patterns and dropping it before it gets to the end point, enforcement of the "STOP" thing for texts, and even things like STIR/SHAKEN which while not specifically about the content of the message (other than the caller id info) still involves each layer asserting what degree of "trust" they give what they're carrying. Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.

hn_acker 3y ago
> Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality. I agree based on the strict definition of net neutrality but disagree based on implementation in practice. Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws. I do think that phone service providers and internet service providers should be common carriers, but letting phone service providers drop spam callers is socially compatible with banning service providers from dropping calls from my hypothetical family member who is a terrorist on death row: some kinds of calls - such as phone calls from family members, work colleagues/managers, friends once removed, etc. - are the kinds of calls which people tacitly mutually agree to receive. I would want phone service providers to turn a blind eye to calls between people with a social relation. Spam calls, on the other hand, are unsolicited calls usually from strangers with no social relation to the receiver. (How to identify spam is a different question, but I'm only arguing about the motivating principles.) The same applies to fraud, which some spam is (your car's extended warranty, etc.). With internet websites, the user usually wants the traffic they request from the website. So ISPs should not be allowed to voluntarily restrict such traffic, and government bodies should be prohibited (with very narrow exceptions) from making ISPs restrict traffic. Where government bodies could instead put penalties on users and website owners, governments should not also target ISPs. (Privacy-violating third-party elements such as ads are not always wanted by the user, but that can be solved with privacy laws rather than exceptions to common carrier laws.)
- tpmoney 3y ago
  >Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws. Sure, spam can be an exception. And so can fraud, and terrorism. And then so can piracy, and porn, and drug content. And once we're back into the exceptions for "immoral" content, the world is our oyster and nothing is off limits for the sake of the children. For any neutrality to work it must be completely neutral with respect to 100% of content. If providers are not to be involved in regulating the content that goes over the wires they provide, that must be held to the furthest extent possible. Spam, piracy and everything else that society decides it doesn't like MUST be dealt with another way that is entirely divorced from requiring or allowing providers to get in the middle of it. Anything else isn't neutrality, it's just conveniently aligned with your current interests, which may or may not be a stable situation.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    I should have been better about my word choice. In my previous comment, I shouldn't have lumped phone carriers in with ISPs, since the net neutrality debate in 2017 was not about phones, and calling/texting service is different from internet service. When I mentioned spam in my previous comment, I was referring only to spam calls and spam text messages, not spam websites. Consider my previous comment overriden by what I write in this comment. In this comment, when I say "net neutrality", I am referring to internet service providers, and internet service provided over cellular service but not the other aspects of phone service. I think that net neutrality should have a few specific exceptions, but spam is not one of them. With the two exceptions I'll mention later, governments should not restrict access to websites if users request the content (most website visits). Terrorism, piracy, porn, drug, and non-malware spam websites fall under this category for adults. (Children are a separate matter, but parents and caretakers bear the responsibility of managing childrens' internet and phone usage.) Porn is off-limits to government restrictions due to the First Amendment. In the cases of piracy, terrorism, illegal drugs, and non-malware spam, governments can target the website operators for their crimes (not for their websites, excepting CSAM) and shut down the websites directly without asking ISPs to do anything other than provide information in response to court orders. I'm not sure how to categorize fraud websites, but non-malware fraud can be corrected after the government deals with the fraudsters, so I'll lump non-malware fraud with these previous kinds of content. My model of net neutrality is that ISPs can look at the content, but they must turn a blind eye to the previously listed categories. Which data ISPs can collect, retain, and share with the government is something for privacy laws to decide. (No sharing with non-governmental parties.) So governments should not be allowed to pressure ISPs to restrict traffic nor force ISPs to even identify it, except if the traffic in question goes to/from a website that spreads CSAM or tries to visitors' computers with malware. CSAM is firmly outside of the First Amendment (while terrorism-related speech is ambiguous in legality), and malware is much more time-sensitive than the above kinds of content. Governments should be able to force ISPs to report identified CSAM. Malware, I'm leaning toward otherwise because I don't know whether the federal government would bother telling affected citizens about it. Regarding phone carriers: Websites receive automatically and are quiet unless configured to be otherwise. The user requests a webpage, and the server sends it. Unlike websites, phone calls interrupt the receivers and force the receiver to check the caller. Spam calls are intrusive in a way that doesn't apply to spam websites, so I'm okay with government regulations of spam calls where I'm not okay with comparable regulations of spam websites. My ideal would be for phone carriers to do block spam calls voluntarily, but that hasn't worked out so far. So my idea is to force phone carriers to identify spam numbers (of both spam callers and spam texters) and to give users the option to delegate blocking of spam numbers to the phone carrier. If the user doesn't want the carrier to block spam, then that's that, though the user can still rely on third-party spam services such as Google's.
josephcsible 3y ago
Isn't STIR/SHAKEN analogous to reverse path filtering? Is that also a violation of net neutrality?

hn_acker 3y ago

> Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality. I agree based on the strict definition of net neutrality but disagree based on implementation in practice. Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws. I do think that phone service providers and internet service providers should be common carriers, but letting phone service providers drop spam callers is socially compatible with banning service providers from dropping calls from my hypothetical family member who is a terrorist on death row: some kinds of calls - such as phone calls from family members, work colleagues/managers, friends once removed, etc. - are the kinds of calls which people tacitly mutually agree to receive. I would want phone service providers to turn a blind eye to calls between people with a social relation. Spam calls, on the other hand, are unsolicited calls usually from strangers with no social relation to the receiver. (How to identify spam is a different question, but I'm only arguing about the motivating principles.) The same applies to fraud, which some spam is (your car's extended warranty, etc.). With internet websites, the user usually wants the traffic they request from the website. So ISPs should not be allowed to voluntarily restrict such traffic, and government bodies should be prohibited (with very narrow exceptions) from making ISPs restrict traffic. Where government bodies could instead put penalties on users and website owners, governments should not also target ISPs. (Privacy-violating third-party elements such as ads are not always wanted by the user, but that can be solved with privacy laws rather than exceptions to common carrier laws.)

tpmoney 3y ago
>Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws. Sure, spam can be an exception. And so can fraud, and terrorism. And then so can piracy, and porn, and drug content. And once we're back into the exceptions for "immoral" content, the world is our oyster and nothing is off limits for the sake of the children. For any neutrality to work it must be completely neutral with respect to 100% of content. If providers are not to be involved in regulating the content that goes over the wires they provide, that must be held to the furthest extent possible. Spam, piracy and everything else that society decides it doesn't like MUST be dealt with another way that is entirely divorced from requiring or allowing providers to get in the middle of it. Anything else isn't neutrality, it's just conveniently aligned with your current interests, which may or may not be a stable situation.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  I should have been better about my word choice. In my previous comment, I shouldn't have lumped phone carriers in with ISPs, since the net neutrality debate in 2017 was not about phones, and calling/texting service is different from internet service. When I mentioned spam in my previous comment, I was referring only to spam calls and spam text messages, not spam websites. Consider my previous comment overriden by what I write in this comment. In this comment, when I say "net neutrality", I am referring to internet service providers, and internet service provided over cellular service but not the other aspects of phone service. I think that net neutrality should have a few specific exceptions, but spam is not one of them. With the two exceptions I'll mention later, governments should not restrict access to websites if users request the content (most website visits). Terrorism, piracy, porn, drug, and non-malware spam websites fall under this category for adults. (Children are a separate matter, but parents and caretakers bear the responsibility of managing childrens' internet and phone usage.) Porn is off-limits to government restrictions due to the First Amendment. In the cases of piracy, terrorism, illegal drugs, and non-malware spam, governments can target the website operators for their crimes (not for their websites, excepting CSAM) and shut down the websites directly without asking ISPs to do anything other than provide information in response to court orders. I'm not sure how to categorize fraud websites, but non-malware fraud can be corrected after the government deals with the fraudsters, so I'll lump non-malware fraud with these previous kinds of content. My model of net neutrality is that ISPs can look at the content, but they must turn a blind eye to the previously listed categories. Which data ISPs can collect, retain, and share with the government is something for privacy laws to decide. (No sharing with non-governmental parties.) So governments should not be allowed to pressure ISPs to restrict traffic nor force ISPs to even identify it, except if the traffic in question goes to/from a website that spreads CSAM or tries to visitors' computers with malware. CSAM is firmly outside of the First Amendment (while terrorism-related speech is ambiguous in legality), and malware is much more time-sensitive than the above kinds of content. Governments should be able to force ISPs to report identified CSAM. Malware, I'm leaning toward otherwise because I don't know whether the federal government would bother telling affected citizens about it. Regarding phone carriers: Websites receive automatically and are quiet unless configured to be otherwise. The user requests a webpage, and the server sends it. Unlike websites, phone calls interrupt the receivers and force the receiver to check the caller. Spam calls are intrusive in a way that doesn't apply to spam websites, so I'm okay with government regulations of spam calls where I'm not okay with comparable regulations of spam websites. My ideal would be for phone carriers to do block spam calls voluntarily, but that hasn't worked out so far. So my idea is to force phone carriers to identify spam numbers (of both spam callers and spam texters) and to give users the option to delegate blocking of spam numbers to the phone carrier. If the user doesn't want the carrier to block spam, then that's that, though the user can still rely on third-party spam services such as Google's.

josephcsible 3y ago

Isn't STIR/SHAKEN analogous to reverse path filtering? Is that also a violation of net neutrality?