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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an ISP is too powerful to allow them to be short circuiting the courts and making value judgements. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern, it’s real.

I don’t know HE’s specific situation with regards to being a common carrier, but I’m surprised there isn’t a conversation about the expectations we have of utility providers who receive privileged operational power over necessary public services.

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Do you really think HE owns most of the fiber they use? It's mostly leased from much larger behemoths that own the physical cables, who treat it as a private conduit for photons, and lack the ability to even know what's being transmitted over it, so can't censor.

Source: https://he.net/about_network.html - you see them talk about "negotiating with the top fiber carriers" and even "long haul wavelengths", which means they don't always lease a whole fiber, sometimes just a small slice of the EM spectrum on one.

IP transit is a value-add on top of an underlying physical asset which already has the properties that you want.

I don’t see a functional difference, do you?

In other words, if I have been granted conditional protected exclusive ownership of physical fiber lines and that requires me to be a common carrier, I can launder the common carrier responsibility by leasing guaranteed bandwidth downstream? That does not check out…

I'm not sure if this transitive common carrier approach makes sense.

Wouldn't that mean that every company that used telephony, railroads, airlines, or shipping would have to be behave like a common carrier?

I'm not sure what the correct balance is but I don't think it makes sense to force common carrier status to propagate in the way you seem to be suggesting.

Using a common carrier for business is different from purchasing reserved quotas from them and then reselling the access. I can see how it isn’t clear when taken to the extreme, but there’s got to be some balance otherwise a carrier could just resell 100% of the bandwidth to some subsidiary to launder it. I don’t know the answer but this at least seems like a pretty big loophole if it were allowed.

I think you can pretty clearly mentally separate a derivative service originating from a leased common line and Hallmark accepting internet orders.

That's actually what Kiwifarms is doing. If you looked at their hosting structure, their providers 1-2 layers up are friends of the admin (one is even posting in this thread), so sending abuse complaints to the hosting provider is dangerous to personal safety. That's why the victims have to go farther upstream to complain to the first reseller who operates in good faith, rather than these fake corporate entities only operated to host kiwifarms.

> Using a common carrier for business is different from purchasing reserved quotas from them and then reselling the access.

OK, I can see how the resale scenario is different from the consume/utilize scenario. Thanks for the clarification.

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