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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

"Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation, and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our network" is not an unreasonable penalty. It's hard to imagine any business of any kind taking the position "feel free to violate the law over our network" or deciding that they just won't do anything about it if people do. Imagine a restaurant that could see you operating an illegal handgun market out of the corner booth and just decided that was fine as long as you tipped your server alright.

This is the most softball approach possible, they're giving you nine warnings before they just stop doing business with you, which is quite a bit nicer than them handing out your info specifically to enable the entertainment industry to take you to court for hundreds of thousands of dollars or reporting you to the FBI.

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> Imagine a restaurant that could see you operating an illegal handgun market out of the corner booth and just decided that was fine as long as you tipped your server alright

Imagine a better analogy because telecom service providers have nothing to do with restaurants (or almost any other type of businesses, regulated utilities are pretty different!). It's more akin to a power company cutting off power to someone who they accuse of using the power that they paid for to make counterfeit handbags. It's quite possibly true, but as a regulated utility it should not be up to them to decide. As long as their services are being paid for they should not get to cut people off.

If AT&T was actually concerned with their network being abused they would go after spammers and robocallers, not someone who downloaded an HBO show. This is one of the concerns of telecoms being media companies.

The law in America is enforced by the courts, not by private corporations.

If you break the law in my restaurant I can ask you to leave.

And you won’t be able to do anything but ask because you are not a police officer. ISP isn’t a court and restaurant operators aren’t officers of the law.

I can stop serving you and refuse to take your money. Kind of like AT&T is doing...

You can for any reason, unless the reason is discrimination against a protected class. But do not pretend that it is for breaking the law, because it's only up to the court to determine whether I broke a law or not.

So if AT&T want to disconnect a customer for an arbitrary reason, fine: but they need to make it more clear initially, while considering their utility status.

They aren't enforcing the law. They're managing their risk as a business, by not doing business with people who could put them at legal risk. If they were "enforcing the law", they'd send you a fine for tens of thousands of dollars and throw you in jail if you didn't pay it.

If a gun store owner knew a guy was buying a gun to shoot up a school, wouldn't you want him to refuse to sell it? Wouldn't you want to hold the gun store responsible for knowingly enabling illegal activity?

(Note that I am using gun analogies in my comments because I feel the positions here are oddly tied to a specific issue, and hypocritical when applied to others. I'm aware these aren't really similar in severity by any means.)

You wrote "don't violate the law over our network". Who determines in this case whether the law is violated? If you changed your statement that this is a precaution to manage legal risk, then we get into an entirely different realm.

What if AT&T's risk management software scores that its customer is "likely" to commit a petty crime by analyzing his traffic? Turn him off as well?

They're not just any business, they're a regulated utility provider selling me service over infrastructure I helped pay for. The regular rules of business don't exactly apply.

The ISP is not creating the process by which the law is broken, only facilitating the transmission.

the ISP is like the roads that you take to get to the gun shop. Yes the gun shop should prevent you from buying a gun to kill someone.

The people who maintain the road to get you to the gun shop should not decide that you cannot use the road.

My local phone company continues to serve me no matter how many laws I break using their service. My postal service continues to server me no matter how many laws I break using their service. Internet service providers should just be declared common carriers, and be done with it. When democrats eventually regain control of the congress and executive, I'm guessing this is what will be done.

democrats are huge supporters of the media companies pushing for stronger enforcement of copyrights. Obama was deep in bed with the RIAA and MPAA. Several of his appointments were RIAA lawyers. Don't automatically expect them to lead the way in copyright reform.

I was thinking net neutrality, not copyright reform. I agree, copyright is a huge political mess.

> "Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation, and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our network" is not an unreasonable penalty.

Monopolies playing judges and prosecutors is very unreasonable. They shouldn't be able to cut off customers by themselves at all, even non-paying.

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