Net Neutrality Protests Move Online, Yet Big Tech Is Quiet

Megalith

Megalith

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Protests to preserve net neutrality migrated online today, but while Reddit, Kickstarter, and other sites have placed calls for action to stop a vote later this week, Facebook, Google, and other giants have taken a back seat in the debate. In the past, the companies have played a leading role in supporting the rules.

Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that supports net neutrality, said the biggest tech companies were less vocal because they were facing more regulatory battles than in past years. “First, the major tech companies are very aware that Washington has turned hostile,” Mr. Feld said. “In this environment, the big tech companies try to keep a low profile and play defense rather than take positions that draw attention.
 
The best thing the government can ever do, is absolutely nothing. The internet flourished and spread for decades without their "help". If you put the government and bureaucrats in charge of the internet you will have everything but "net neutrality". It will become a game of who can line the pockets of the political class the most. And so far google, facebook, amazon, etc have greased the skids the most and therefore they get all the benefits of "net neutrality"
 
I think now that google fiber is seeing the cost of expanding their ISP infrastructure they are thinking twice about letting the government regulate their business.
 
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
 
bildad said:
The best thing the government can ever do, is absolutely nothing. The internet flourished and spread for decades without their "help". If you put the government and bureaucrats in charge of the internet you will have everything but "net neutrality". It will become a game of who can line the pockets of the political class the most. And so far google, facebook, amazon, etc have greased the skids the most and therefore they get all the benefits of "net neutrality"
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Considering that the Internet started largely because of government research and spending, I think the Internet had a lot of government help. Unfortunately, taking a "hands off" approach to most things Internet has left us with several mega corporations that are largely freed from normal commerce regulations because it is commerce "On the Internet or Using a Computer". Think EULA, TOS, PP and other forced 'agreements' that allow Internet companies to do things that B&M companies can't do.

The reason we have the argument over Title II vs not is Congress can't get its act together and pass a modern set of rules that are tailored to the modern Internet instead of forcing the FCC, FTC, etc to use decades old rules designed for the telegraph, telephone, TV and radio. Not blaming a particular party, both have had clear majorities and failed to act.
 
"The current regulations are imperfect...therefore, there should be no regulations whatsoever."
"Regulatory capture is bad...therefore, there should be no regulation whatsoever."

Come on, people...are you serious? These are some blatantly terrible arguments. :facepalm:
 
Dead Parrot said:
Considering that the Internet started largely because of government research and spending, I think the Internet had a lot of government help. Unfortunately, taking a "hands off" approach to most things Internet has left us with several mega corporations that are largely freed from normal commerce regulations because it is commerce "On the Internet or Using a Computer". Think EULA, TOS, PP and other forced 'agreements' that allow Internet companies to do things that B&M companies can't do.

The reason we have the argument over Title II vs not is Congress can't get its act together and pass a modern set of rules that are tailored to the modern Internet instead of forcing the FCC, FTC, etc to use decades old rules designed for the telegraph, telephone, TV and radio. Not blaming a particular party, both have had clear majorities and failed to act.
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Congress simply does not have the expertise to be ABLE to find a "modern set of rules", even if it was warranted. They screw up every single thing they touch, in any case. We're better off WITHOUT government interference.
 
Good article.
Ehren8879 said:
I consider this forum a collection of well informed individuals.

I ask that you all read the following article from an industry publication and share your thoughts below

http://www.multichannel.com/news/content/new-balance-net-power/416875
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Calling content producers and aggregators "edge providers" is an incredibly coy misdirection.
It groups them with ISPs as if they are even close to the same thing.
This is big money trying to squeeze out the new guys.
No surprise though
 
Yes ban all regulations, like the FDA that stops companies from poisoning us, the FAA that requires airlines to maintain their fleets to a certain standard, and the CPA that stops corporations from holding you up by your ankles to shake out the loose change. Regulation in and of itself is not a bad thing. If you are a CEO, hedge fund investor, or billionaire (any hands up out there? No?) then regulations are the enemy. For everyone else, they are there to protect you against entities that would otherwise crush you under their weight.
 
Gweenz said:
Yes ban all regulations, like the FDA that stops companies from poisoning us, the FAA that requires airlines to maintain their fleets to a certain standard, and the CPA that stops corporations from holding you up by your ankles to shake out the loose change. Regulation in and of itself is not a bad thing. If you are a CEO, hedge fund investor, or billionaire (any hands up out there? No?) then regulations are the enemy. For everyone else, they are there to protect you against entities that would otherwise crush you under their weight.
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Those regulations don't do squat. Airlines keep their planes in good shape because it costs too much to replace them. "CPA" is not a Federal agency, it's a private organization designation for accountants, completely uninvolved with the government. The FDA could easily be replaced with penalties that would put offending companies out of business and save good companies hundred of thousands to millions, and bring more competition and better food and drugs to us.

The thing is to stop forcing companies to do things certain ways, not just to save money but to open up the possibilities to new ways of doing things and saving money, and completely destroy bad actors with penalties. Regulations do nothing but hurt the good guys. LAWS with properly enforced PENALTIES stop the bad guys.
 
dgingeri said:
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
Click to expand...

I don't think you quite understand how DDoS works. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by treating trafic equally prevents ISPs from blocking DDoS. DDoS comes from thousands of unknown sources and you cannot tell the difference between legitimate traffic vs the bad. It could be from IoT devices, compromised computers from anywhere.
 
Z3r0k3wl said:
I don't think you quite understand how DDoS works. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by treating trafic equally prevents ISPs from blocking DDoS. DDoS comes from thousands of unknown sources and you cannot tell the difference between legitimate traffic vs the bad. It could be from IoT devices, compromised computers from anywhere.
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In the case of a DDoS attack, ISPs could offer a service that would watch QoS information for certain customers, and if they see too many of a certain type of request, they could then identify it as a DDoS attack and throttle or block further requests of the same type to the same address across the entire network, preventing the attack from succeeding. However, due to the "you MUST do it THIS way" rules, they can't even offer such a service. It is up to the customer's firewall to identify and block such attacks, which is much harder to do at that level.

When I was younger, I used to go to Bronco's football games, and I noticed that before the game, the Denver Police would redirect streets in all directions from the football stadium to be one way, incoming to the stadium parking, and then after the game they'd redirect all the streets to outgoing from the stadium parking. It tremendously helped with traffic, rather than just having the entrances to the parking lots be the point to handle the traffic. That's how ISPs would be able to handle a potential DDoS attack, and handle it far better than just the customer handling it at the firewall.

Furthermore, my company has to deal with hundreds of port scans constantly to many of our servers, and ISPs are not even ALLOWED to identify the scanning systems or block them because of net neutrality rules. let alone do anything about them.
 
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dgingeri said:
In the case of a DDoS attack, ISPs could offer a service that would watch QoS information for certain customers, and if they see too many of a certain type of request, they could then identify it as a DDoS attack and throttle or block further requests of the same type to the same address across the entire network, preventing the attack from succeeding. However, due to the "you MUST do it THIS way" rules, they can't even offer such a service. It is up to the customer's firewall to identify and block such attacks, which is much harder to do at that level.

When I was younger, I used to go to Bronco's football games, and I noticed that before the game, the Denver Police would redirect streets in all directions from the football stadium to be one way, incoming to the stadium parking, and then after the game they'd redirect all the streets to outgoing from the stadium parking. It tremendously helped with traffic, rather than just having the entrances to the parking lots be the point to handle the traffic. That's how ISPs would be able to handle a potential DDoS attack, and handle it far better than just the customer handling it at the firewall.
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QoS is not designed for that. It is nothing more than a packet prioritization tool. It's not even a good one especially when strong cryptography is used such as SSL or TLS. Meaning QoS tools cannot do deep-packet inspections when strong encryption is used. QoS is only used for intranet where you don't need strong encryption. Which brings me back to the not able to tell the difference between what's good and bad. You can't tell because of strong encryption.
 
dgingeri said:
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
Click to expand...


DDOS prevention is not the responsibility of the ISP, and they wouldn't really know the difference between DDOS and legit traffic. DDOS protection is the responsibility of the site/server/service hosts.

ISPs are there to move data, and if you are a service provider you don't want the ISP filtering ANY data. You want the data to hit your servers (or edge DDOS protection) so you can analyze it yourself.
 
Z3r0k3wl said:
QoS is not designed for that. It is nothing more than a packet prioritization tool. It's not even a good one especially when strong cryptography is used such as SSL or TLS. Meaning QoS tools cannot do deep-packet inspections when strong encryption is used. QoS is only used for intranet where you don't need strong encryption. Which brings me back to the not able to tell the difference between what's good and bad. You can't tell because of strong encryption.
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The current specific designated QoS service isn't designed to test that, as I was phrasing it, it is a general quality of service idea, which can be monitored and adjsuted to however it is needed. Monitoring network wide for traffic to specifc sites, no matter if it is encrypted or not, is easy to do. My company's Solarwinds setup does that constantly.
 
Highly doubt big tech is silent, more like they are working in the back ground through third parties.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...and-fake-email-addresses-pew-finds/904439001/
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Net neutrality comments mostly came from bots and fake email addresses, Pew finds

Among the nearly 22 million public comments about net neutrality filed with the Federal Communications Commission in recent months, only 6% of them were unique comments,

The vast majority of the comments filed, 94% of them, had similar wording and were submitted up to hundreds of thousands of times, Pew found.

The seven most-submitted comments — six of which argued for an overturning of the current rules — made up more than one-third (38%) of all submissions, Pew says.
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Biznatch said:
DDOS prevention is not the responsibility of the ISP, and they wouldn't really know the difference between DDOS and legit traffic. DDOS protection is the responsibility of the site/server/service hosts.

ISPs are there to move data, and if you are a service provider you don't want the ISP filtering ANY data. You want the data to hit your servers (or edge DDOS protection) so you can analyze it yourself.
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Logically, it would be a whole lot easier for the ISP to monitor network wide traffic coming to designated internal endpoints and regulate the traffic within the network according to rules, and it would take a whole lot less compute power and a whole lot less trouble to do it that way than to monitor it just at the firewall. ISPs could monitor such things for customers as a paid service, and it would cost the customer far less than what they'd spend on a firewall that could defend against modern DDoS attacks. They could also monitor and block port scanners and traffic on known ports that hackers use for some of their tools. They could also monitor and block traffic for the CnC of botnets and block that. It could end the entire idea of botnets, making the internet safer for everyone, except the hackers.

However, net neutrality rules specifically forbid it. They say that ISPs can't even monitor the traffic to even SEE if something is suspicious.
 
dgingeri said:
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
Click to expand...

wat

1. Equal treatment of packets does not bar DDoS protection. Packets may be dropped at will given fair disclosure of the algorithm/methods used.

2. Relying on your carrier to block "hacking tools" or port scans is pathetic. This is not a thing, and where it is, I'm sure it's hilarious. Any sort of deep packet inspection is nearing obsoletion.

3. Spam blocking is another expensive or value-add service which operates very similarly to DDoS protection/prevention (peer reviewof material) and is completely irrelevant to net neutrality.

4. Torrent traffic (or swarm protocols in general) are an invaluable part of the way web-software communicates in this age. It's not just bitorrent, "the evil-nemesis of the poor entertainment industry". It's DHT, DTN, and blockchain based protocols. Besides, when properly encrypted, there's no way to determine what data is being transmitted anyway. Similarly, nearing obsoletion as is point 2.

bugleyman said:
"The current regulations are imperfect...therefore, there should be no regulations whatsoever."
"Regulatory capture is bad...therefore, there should be no regulation whatsoever."

Come on, people...are you serious? These are some blatantly terrible arguments. :facepalm:
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Hehe. Politicians are so busy being posterboys they have no time left in the day to develop reasonable legislation. It merely becomes campaign fuel, then the next guy wastes all their time tearing it up.

Back on topic, as flawed as nearly every argument Pai has tried to make, the core concept of applying partial Title II conditions to ISPs is weak. I'm sure larger internet companies are just falling back on their guns, as usual. Software developments and the way the internet works have always vastly outpaced related legislation, and thus, these concerns are now bundled into the featureset of new protocols. e.g. HTTP/2, TLS1.3, DOH, QUIC, et cetera. They reduce the "overseer" function of carriers and simplify their business for them.
 
I've just been told that our ISP already does those services, monitoring and blocking DDoS and such, as part of our company service.
 
Kalabalana said:
Good article.

Calling content producers and aggregators "edge providers" is an incredibly coy misdirection.
It groups them with ISPs as if they are even close to the same thing.
This is big money trying to squeeze out the new guys.
No surprise though
Click to expand...

That’s laughable. Local and state governments made sure of that a long time ago. Democrat and Republican.
 
velusip said:
wat

2. Relying on your carrier to block "hacking tools" or port scans is pathetic. This is not a thing, and where it is, I'm sure it's hilarious. Any sort of deep packet inspection is nearing obsoletion.
Click to expand...

It wouldn't require DPI, just reading the headers, which switches and routers do anyway. Seeing one IP run single packet traffic across several ports to several IPs is obviously a port scan. It would be nice to be able to have that blocked. My company's servers see dozens of those scans per hour on our AWS servers, and we have to pay for that traffic. Sure, it isn't much, but it is still extra cost we shouldn't have to pay for. If their ISP would actually monitor for such activity, then identify the source and cut them off, that would prevent such things, but net neutrality rules prevent doing exactly that.
 
Z3r0k3wl said:
Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by treating trafic equally prevents ISPs from blocking DDoS. DDoS comes from thousands of unknown sources and you cannot tell the difference between legitimate traffic vs the bad. It could be from IoT devices, compromised computers from anywhere.
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That is so wonderful that ISPs want to perform network security for all of my servers and IoT on the internet. How much is this going to cost me and do I have a choice of doing it myself and not being charged by my ISP?
 
These guys will vote it down no matter what. only way it would get stopped is if there was a hostile take over of the entire government.
 
dgingeri said:
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
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I would like to hear more of your thoughts...Im intrigued,,,
 
Net Neutrality has always been a solution in search of a problem. If anything, the Internet is more censorious and worse off than it was before NN was enacted.

Get rid of it.
 
NN is a bandaid. It's far from perfect, but it's functionally necessary due to the govt. granted monopolies. Govt regulation to fix other bad govt regulation isn't ideal, but there is currently zero political will to restructure the granted monopolies. Without competition, there's no self-regulating mechanism for prioritized services.
 
bildad said:
The best thing the government can ever do, is absolutely nothing. The internet flourished and spread for decades without their "help". If you put the government and bureaucrats in charge of the internet you will have everything but "net neutrality". It will become a game of who can line the pockets of the political class the most. And so far google, facebook, amazon, etc have greased the skids the most and therefore they get all the benefits of "net neutrality"
Click to expand...

The internet is quite literally a government invention. Your whole argument is void.
 
Z3r0k3wl said:
I don't think you quite understand how DDoS works. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by treating trafic equally prevents ISPs from blocking DDoS. DDoS comes from thousands of unknown sources and you cannot tell the difference between legitimate traffic vs the bad. It could be from IoT devices, compromised computers from anywhere.
Click to expand...

Scare tactic opinions like that are severe fringe cases. Don't add fuel to the fire.
 
dgingeri said:
This "treat all traffic equally" actually prevents ISPs from being able to do anything about DDoS attacks and other types of hacking. They can't target or slow down traffic that is involved in DDoS attacks, so many companies take the full brunt of it. Known hacking tools and port scanner traffic can't be stopped because of it. The same goes for known spammers. Also, torrent traffic could be slowed or stopped, stopping many types of movie and music pirating, but net neutrality prevents ISPs from doing anything about it. Net neutrality is mostly about protecting criminal activity.
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tenor.gif


i don't even have words.

this was a way better system i guess.

1513133409218.jpg
 
dgingeri said:
The current specific designated QoS service isn't designed to test that, as I was phrasing it, it is a general quality of service idea, which can be monitored and adjsuted to however it is needed. Monitoring network wide for traffic to specifc sites, no matter if it is encrypted or not, is easy to do. My company's Solarwinds setup does that constantly.
Click to expand...

No it can't. QoS cannot prevent nor mitigate DDOS. DDOS widgets would just set their QOS to top priority.
 
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