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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

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…

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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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