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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Like I pointed out in the sister thread about EU telcos:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29875805

Phone carriers do not want to be a dumb pipe - and having Private Relay go through their networks breaks:

- HTTP header enrichment (which they use for self-care/customer sites/services),

- zero rating (which they set up deals for with social networks, music streaming services, etc., often applying specific QoS tags) and

- all sorts of value added services (many using deep packet inspection and DNS analytics) that they offer instead of raw, unfettered connectivity.

I don't think many people are aware of exactly how much data telcos are sitting on, anonymized or not.

And, of course, it also plays havoc with legal interception because there is no easy way to do MITM.

(edit: readability)

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Is this really about EU telcos, though? In the European article I mostly see messages about this from UK telcos, which are European but no EU anymore. I've heard that UK net neutrality law is kind of a joke, and now that they're outside of EU control the UK can do whatever the hell it wants, and I fear for UK citizens that the mostly consumer-focused EU ideals aren't shared by the current UK leadership.

Plenty of telcos want to force competitors out of the market with zero rating and triple play subscriptions, but I don't think any of them have made any moves against net neutrality this bad. A few years ago I've seen carriers doing HTTP introspection to force images through their compression proxies (usually budget ISPs who want to stop people from actually using up their data plan so they can make a profit) but that seems to have stopped completely now.

As for legal interception, this doesn't make any difference. When law enforcement finds that the suspects are communicating over Apple's network, they'll just knock on Apple's door with a warrant and demand a wire tap from their network. That's how legal interception of "privacy protection" VPN providers works, and Apple isn't even trying to ship traffic outside national borders, just to the closest data center.

> Is this really about EU telcos, though?

From that article:

> Via The Telegraph, operators including Vodafone, Telefonica and T-Mobile signed an open letter voicing their opposition to the rollout of the feature.

Those are each large telcos with operations in a multitude of countries.

But the operations in individual countries are legally separate companies, aren't they? Plus they still have to obey local laws in every country.

You are correct.

They are, but most telcos have entirely separate businesses in each EU country, the same way T-Mobile USA has little to do with its European counterpart.

The Telegraph only seems to provide any sources that are about the UK. I can't find any sources outside of the Telegraph for Telefonica, for example, mostly because Google only lists articles copy/pasting the Telegraph.

Apple allows network providers to turn this feature off, but any DPI and analysis the ISPs do would be highly illegal in the EU, so I don't see the advantage that disabling private relays would get them.

Honestly, Apple should provide an override for this block. It seems to be based on DNS, so a custom DNS server should be enough to bypass the block entirely it seems?

> The Telegraph only seems to provide any sources that are about the UK. I can't find any sources outside of the Telegraph for Telefonica, for example, mostly because Google only lists articles copy/pasting the Telegraph.

I read it as referring to those telcos' international HQ's. The Telegraph article reports that the letter to the European Commission was signed by Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange and T-Mobile.

First, Telefónica isn't active in the UK under that name, only as part of Virgin Media O2 (their joint venture with Liberty Global) [1]. T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) and Orange (France Télécom) haven't even been active in the UK at all since 2016 (when BT acquired their joint venture EE) [2].

Therefore, if the Telegraph were reporting on the UK only, the list of telcos that signed the letter doesn't make sense in the first place.

Second, if the letter were indeed authored by UK telcos, why would they have sent it to the European Commission? That's an EU institution, and the UK isn't part of the EU anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Media_O2

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EE_Limited

Exactly, carriers really don't want anything that helps push net neutrality in any real way. They don't want to be commoditized to where it's just pipe for Internet data to transmit through as you mentioned.

MITM is pretty moot right now with TLS everywhere. Apple is taking this stand because it’s inline with their business.

Zero-rating is really bad for Apple. And by making themselves the virtual network layer, they have the ability to roll out their own last mile networks later.

To be fair, you could make the same argument that TLS is moot because everything at the other layers (routing, application, and even hardware) is extremely vulnerable to attack. MITM is still a very real thing.

If anything makes it moot, it's not other technology; it's social engineering attacks.

The point of TLS is that every bit of network infrastructure could be compromised but your connection would still be secure as long as your own device and the end server (and the cert authority) remained clean.

One big difference in the US is that most telcos also have ad businesses, and this will negatively impact them.

This is more about selling data to aggregators.

I have been working through some consulting activities with 8 telcos over the past years on the topic BiG DaTa. While it is true that telcos have data, ALL of the telcos I have worked with lack the capability to do ANYTHING with that data.

First, they dont get the right people, because good people dont go to telco. Second, they have super fragmented stacks, especially in markets that have consolidated over the years. Third, they simply dont have figures out ANY business model for that data (except some We SeLl LoCaTiOn DaTa To GoVeRnMenTs that is illegal in most Western countries anyway by now).

So... all this "TELCO SOOO BAD BECAUSE ALL MY DATA THEY EAT" talking is laughable to me after seeing the truth. I am surprised what people here in HN think of the capabilities of telcos.

Edit: as I saw some comments below on "three letter agencies". Fun fact, ALL the 8 telcos that I have experienced hat guys from the local "three letter agencies" working there to detect crime stuff.

Shouldn't those all be true of ISPs too, though? Why are telcos different? Is it just because they need stricter QoS because of airwaves vs. cables? Do you think that argument still holds water in a post-5G-saturated world?

There is very little room for EU telcos to do any sort of inspection of packets, beyond maybe identifying if its streaming traffic or regular traffic (there are some subscriptions which give you free streaming traffic). Storing personal information is a big no-no, and anyone can at any time request a dump of all identifyable information a telco has about you. While I understand that private relay will give telcos less actional information, its not that much to work with to begin with.

I doubt long term that it causes much havoc with three letter agencies. If anything, it simplifies it a small bit because now they can look at the records of only two intermediaries, Apple and the CDNs they use. That said, why go to the trouble? Depending on how it's configured, Apple would already likely be tracking your browser history in iCloud, backups, etc. Plus websites that track user activity (e.g. have logins) can be asked directly for data.

I am pretty bad with networks, but isn’t most of the http traffic https nowadays? How can they do header enrichment and the others, then? Isn’t that the purpose of https to forbid that? The only thing they are supposed to see is the target domain.

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