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Comment by dscpls | Hacker News Reader

How do we feel about this with regard to net neutrality? Are we ok with the blocking they choose to do here because we agree with them ethically in this case?

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Protesting like this is always a very fine line, but i'm personally okay with breaking a law if you are doing it for the sole purpose of trying to change that law.

That being said, i'm genuinely struggling to think of a situation where someone has done this kind of thing for a cause that I disagree with...

Went on a Carnival cruise a month ago. To log out of the internet in one device you had to visit logout.com. They redirected this internally to their own portal.

I'm pretty sure that this is not in line with EU NN law where blocking access to sites is only allowed for security, legal reasons, or to preventing impending network congestion (Article 3(3) of Regulation 2015/2120) Blocking arbitrary websites out of spite is probably neither of these reasons and therefore not justified.

Protest is legal.

Particular methods of protest, not always.

Presumes corporations have free speech rights.

shudder This is the closest I've come to identifying with the Mitt Romney quote "Corporations are people, my friend." I recognize corporations are a collective entity comprised of people and people have free speech rights. I'm trying to figure out for myself where the boundaries of those rights are, since a collective naturally has more power to impact others than an individual, simply because it takes less individual energy for a collective action than it does for an individual action of the same magnitude.

I have to meditate on this. Anyone have thoughts to share on this to help me find clarity?

Well, it depends on how you think rights should be granted. I personally don't agree with how rights is handled in a lot of cases, giving a sufficiently powerful entity freedom is equivalent to taking away freedom from every other lesser entity it happens to dislike.

Only an entity with greater authority than yourself can grant you any rights, so what happens when it reaches the point where a company is as influential as a small government? A national government?

Consider what you're saying and why a position against corporate speech rights may not be really what you're against. If you come into this with an assumption about what "those greedy, self-serving corporations" might use such rights to say, but second guess it when a corporation agrees with your position: aren't you really saying that it's not the idea of corporate speech rights that you care about, but only what they might say with those rights? If it is corporate speech rights that you care about, the content shouldn't matter at all.

I'm on the opposite side as you. Corporations are merely associations of people (shareholders) working in common cause. Sure that cause is usually profit, but it doesn't have to be only that. Just as a political party is an association of people, or a non-profit organization is an association of people, I firmly hold people can come together in common cause be that for profit or societal action.

Consider Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and their current push against the sitting president: https://www.benjerry.com/flavors/pecan-resist-ice-cream. Should Ben & Jerry's be allowed to participate in this distinctly political discussion and during an election cycle? I would say yes. Ben & Jerry's does not support my ideology at all (OK, I'm not actually a Trump supporter or even a "conservative", so I don't have a horse in the "Resist" race, but that's besides the point). And that's even with them being foreign owned (relative to the U.S.) I disagree with the ISP's politics... but believe that those people that are making these decisions should have the right to use their company's resources in support of their beliefs.

You need to clarify whether you stand for principle or whether you are on a team. If principle, then it seems like the ISP's actions are not in line with your principles. If you're just on a team... we'll OK... then I guess it doesn't really matter, does it. :-)

It’s not strictly a block. Just a pop-over that explains how Elsevier sucks and has a button to proceed to Elseviers page.

May be enough to skirt the NN law, or not.

> May be enough to skirt the NN law, or not.

Based on the wording of 3(3) (without doing further research), I'd suggest probably not:

> Providers of internet access services shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver

https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...

Wouldn’t the court have a hard time condemning them based on this clause, considering they previously ordered them to go break it?

Probably not. Even though they should.

I have no idea if it's legal or not and I could not care less. There is no obligation to obey the law. The law is wrong when it requires that ISPs block websites and I hope Bahnhof and other ISPs will do everything in their power to resist it.

I will choose the IPS that resist censorship and government spying the most even if it means I will have to pay extra. I know that these blocks are trivial to circumvent but I think the principal is very important.

Isn't that the exact point they are making?

They either not block or block anything.

They didn’t even block the domain, they put up a protest page. There’s a link at the bottom to go to the real site.

They are not blocking them indefinitely (or at all). I think it's not correct to even call this "blocking".

Basically they are mitm-ing to factually explain the situation at hand and then they offer the users to go-ahead with visiting Elsevier if they want to.

it's one of the reasons why we don't need NN

Bandwidth isn't unlimited.

Without net neutrality companies like Elsevier/Google/Facebook could pay a company like Bahnhof for a special treatment. Such as priority traffic for discounts. We -in Europe- decided we really don't wanna go down that road. This law, however...

It is necessary though because before you know it traffic such as Tor or SSH or OpenVPN or whatever is considered misc gets lower priority.

>Without net neutrality companies like Elsevier/Google/Facebook could pay a company like Bahnhof for a special treatment.

And customers could just use another ISP in that case. Net neutrality is only an issue when you have government enforced monopolies for ISPs like in the US.

Yeah, that sounds really fluffy and sweet until you realise there's a huge barrier for entry: you won't easily have ROI since you need to invest in infrastructure. Heck, you won't even have the wireless 4G licenses. There's only so many.

There are 4 major mobile telcos in The Netherlands. #3 wants to merge with #4 (Tele2) so we may end up with a triopoly [1], and #3 may then use the cheap LTE/4G license which #4 got for a cheap price.

For wired, if you're lucky you can pick fiber. Otherwise you're stuck with cable or DSL from the duopolists [2], if they even both provide decent network at your location, that is. All the others are merely resellers who don't own the actual network(s).

It isn't much different in the rest of Europe. What is different is that there's more opponents of net neutrality, and obviously a duopoly is better than a monopoly, and a triopoly is better than a duopoly or monopoly. However it is far from an ideal situation; it isn't a healthy market. Who'd have thought if you sold entire infrastructures to companies (the cable infrastructure were owned by the local governments before, and the telephone network by the government as well) or if you sell a limited amount of licenses.

[1] KPN, Ziggo (VodafoneZiggo joint venture), T-Mobile.

[2] KPN, Vodafone (VodafoneZiggo joint venture).

> We -in Europe- decided we really don't wanna go down that road.

Europe does not have net neutrality in mobile. Zero-rating is a way to subsidize specific services with "video pass", "social pass", "chat pass" etc, which are uber popular throughout europe

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