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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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