Comcast 'blocks' encrypted email service: Reminder of why net neutrality matters | Hacker News Reader

Comcast 'blocks' encrypted email service: Reminder of why net neutrality matters

zdnet.com

82 pointstony10115 comments

> According to a spokesperson, engineers investigated the apparent outage but found there was no evidence of a connection breakage between Comcast and Tutanota. The company keeps records of issues that trigger incidents -- but found nothing to suggest an issue. The spokesperson did not want to speculate further.

Net neutrality doesn't stop ISPs or admins from making weird mistakes. Is there any evidence that anything more interesting than that happened?

Agree, such a non-story

It's just a pseudo-story, clickbait. The nerdy version of a buzzfeed article about cheese.

Everyone wants a reason to beat up on Comcast - for reasons real or imagined.

Like, its not as if we have a shortage of real reasons to beat up on Comcast - but if our side makes up falsities, or presumes lack of good faith without any evidence - we just lost the moral high ground in the argument.

What a clickbait.

Intermittent DNS issue. Happens with any provider from time to time.

And what a great promo piece opportunity for that email service used by “hundreds”!

Hundreds of Comcast users, to be clear. And that's just the article's random number, I doubt there's anything backing it up.

So, Comcast almost certainly didn’t block tutanota. This looks like a regular DNS fuckup.

As you’d expect from zdnet, the writing is fascinatingly bad:

>But it's troubling, just a few months after the net neutrality rules were repealed, to see internet providers with arbitrary control over what customers can see and access

Truly shocking that internet providers are technically able to limit what their customers can access.

Riddle me this:

How can you tell the difference between the government asking Comcast to block a certain site for a few days, and Comcast's normal level of service?

Without more evidence, you can't.

Occam's razor proves useful here. A more common and likely scenario is a glitch not malicious intent. Until evidence of such intent is brought to light there is very little reason to assume it exists.

I don't know why Comcast would do this, it doesn't seem like it would be in their best interest to block an email service. Yes I know they have their own email service, but they also don't block other competitors, like hulu. My guess is they had a request to do so from the government and may have a gag order.

Comcast owns 30% of Hulu through NBCUniversal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

Hanlons Razor seems apropos here.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Also, DNS does weird things sometimes.

or why ISP competition matters

It's not the internet if they don't deliver you the internet.

There's an old saying: in any headline that asks a question, if any of the words are in quotation marks then the answer to the question is "No".

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