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Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. As they argue, what's going to happen when an isp shuts off service to a hospital due to automated systems put in place to mitigate this ruling? Mistakes can be corrected in due time, but how much damage will be done in the interim?

It's so exhausting that we don't just commit to net neutrality. It's the obvious logistical answer to this with direct comparisons in telephone service. Should have been settled years ago, but for some reason were letting the corporate copyright class spend money to slow it down.

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Typically most institutions such as hospitals have multi T1 lines from separate providers. Ignoring piracy/automated systems, sometimes isps just have outages, so it's the same problem.

I'm not sure if you're able to comment, but my intuitive speculation is that institutions have ISP connections that are in what I imagine to be a "dedicated service" tier.

My hunch is that these accounts would be exempt from certain actions compared to residential accounts.

Exactly, two ISPs with BGP.

T1 lines, which max out at 1.544Mbit, for internet access in 2023?

That's why they said "multi T1 lines".

It would take 6,477 bonded T1 lines to match the capacity of a single 10GBASE-LR fiber link.

Well, I think you'll agree, that counts as multiple!

No, Verizon phased out T1 which is now PRI handoff via fiber. That’s only for phone service in most cases.

In my experience, a lot of places that want to do redundant wired Internet have the local fiber provider and local cable provider going into some failover or SD-WAN setup. T1 would be rare (but possible) for Internet access, not rare for phone (funny thing is the phone might be SIP over Internet over T1).

You might even have crappy situations due to people not understanding what they are buying (or other weird reasons) where 2 ISPs share 1 LEC circuit, e.g. a single physical fiber line.

But anyway, a provider cutting you off permanently is more than an outage. You need to get another ISP.

Modern hospitals are designed to run ‘offline’ from infrastructure such as water, electricity and sewer for a period of time, typically a few days. When there’s a major disaster (earthquake, hurricane, terrorist attack) these services can fail at the exact time that hospitals see a flood of injured people.

I haven’t specifically looked into internet but I’d be surprised if they were unable to provide care with a down internet connection.

That doesn't mean that what's happening is acceptable.

Imagine a similar scenario but it involved the power being cut, or the water?

Sure hospitals have backup generators that doesn't mean that they should be used for instances like this.

... and medical device vendors and patient record systems have done their very best to make that impossible.

Hospitals can work without water, electricity and sewage ... but not without internet. Well, it's possible, but at 50% or so capacity (and I'm sure that number is going up)

A hospital filled up assuming 100% capacity that falls back to 50% capacity, however is going to be VERY tough to keep running for the doctors.

A lot of these systems are locally hosted on hospital infrastructure to guarantee that when internet service goes out, medical records can still be accessed. And I cannot name many hospital medical devices that are Internet connected, rather than just connected to a local Intranet.

Half true. They will be able to provide emergency care but the normal bureaucracy of healthcare services will shut down if the internet stops working.

I don't think this is related to net neutrality.

it is related in the sense that ISPs have no business or should not be burdened with policing the data their customers transfer. if someone violates the law it is up to the courts to prosecute them and if appropriate deny them internet access. however given that internet access is now as important as a phone used to be, this should practically never happen.

It's worth pointing out that society is shifting HARD on the idea that pipe service providers should be "neutral" with respect to the traffic they're carrying. Recent pushes around scam calls and texts have resulted in policies with providers to more heavily screen their customers from the start, requirements for text campaigns to submit their content for review, internal evaluation of traffic for fraud patterns and dropping it before it gets to the end point, enforcement of the "STOP" thing for texts, and even things like STIR/SHAKEN which while not specifically about the content of the message (other than the caller id info) still involves each layer asserting what degree of "trust" they give what they're carrying.

Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.

> Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.

I agree based on the strict definition of net neutrality but disagree based on implementation in practice. Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws.

I do think that phone service providers and internet service providers should be common carriers, but letting phone service providers drop spam callers is socially compatible with banning service providers from dropping calls from my hypothetical family member who is a terrorist on death row: some kinds of calls - such as phone calls from family members, work colleagues/managers, friends once removed, etc. - are the kinds of calls which people tacitly mutually agree to receive. I would want phone service providers to turn a blind eye to calls between people with a social relation. Spam calls, on the other hand, are unsolicited calls usually from strangers with no social relation to the receiver. (How to identify spam is a different question, but I'm only arguing about the motivating principles.) The same applies to fraud, which some spam is (your car's extended warranty, etc.).

With internet websites, the user usually wants the traffic they request from the website. So ISPs should not be allowed to voluntarily restrict such traffic, and government bodies should be prohibited (with very narrow exceptions) from making ISPs restrict traffic. Where government bodies could instead put penalties on users and website owners, governments should not also target ISPs. (Privacy-violating third-party elements such as ads are not always wanted by the user, but that can be solved with privacy laws rather than exceptions to common carrier laws.)

>Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws.

Sure, spam can be an exception. And so can fraud, and terrorism. And then so can piracy, and porn, and drug content. And once we're back into the exceptions for "immoral" content, the world is our oyster and nothing is off limits for the sake of the children.

For any neutrality to work it must be completely neutral with respect to 100% of content. If providers are not to be involved in regulating the content that goes over the wires they provide, that must be held to the furthest extent possible. Spam, piracy and everything else that society decides it doesn't like MUST be dealt with another way that is entirely divorced from requiring or allowing providers to get in the middle of it. Anything else isn't neutrality, it's just conveniently aligned with your current interests, which may or may not be a stable situation.

I should have been better about my word choice. In my previous comment, I shouldn't have lumped phone carriers in with ISPs, since the net neutrality debate in 2017 was not about phones, and calling/texting service is different from internet service. When I mentioned spam in my previous comment, I was referring only to spam calls and spam text messages, not spam websites. Consider my previous comment overriden by what I write in this comment.

In this comment, when I say "net neutrality", I am referring to internet service providers, and internet service provided over cellular service but not the other aspects of phone service. I think that net neutrality should have a few specific exceptions, but spam is not one of them.

With the two exceptions I'll mention later, governments should not restrict access to websites if users request the content (most website visits).

Terrorism, piracy, porn, drug, and non-malware spam websites fall under this category for adults. (Children are a separate matter, but parents and caretakers bear the responsibility of managing childrens' internet and phone usage.) Porn is off-limits to government restrictions due to the First Amendment. In the cases of piracy, terrorism, illegal drugs, and non-malware spam, governments can target the website operators for their crimes (not for their websites, excepting CSAM) and shut down the websites directly without asking ISPs to do anything other than provide information in response to court orders. I'm not sure how to categorize fraud websites, but non-malware fraud can be corrected after the government deals with the fraudsters, so I'll lump non-malware fraud with these previous kinds of content. My model of net neutrality is that ISPs can look at the content, but they must turn a blind eye to the previously listed categories. Which data ISPs can collect, retain, and share with the government is something for privacy laws to decide. (No sharing with non-governmental parties.)

So governments should not be allowed to pressure ISPs to restrict traffic nor force ISPs to even identify it, except if the traffic in question goes to/from a website that spreads CSAM or tries to visitors' computers with malware. CSAM is firmly outside of the First Amendment (while terrorism-related speech is ambiguous in legality), and malware is much more time-sensitive than the above kinds of content. Governments should be able to force ISPs to report identified CSAM. Malware, I'm leaning toward otherwise because I don't know whether the federal government would bother telling affected citizens about it.

Regarding phone carriers:

Websites receive automatically and are quiet unless configured to be otherwise. The user requests a webpage, and the server sends it. Unlike websites, phone calls interrupt the receivers and force the receiver to check the caller. Spam calls are intrusive in a way that doesn't apply to spam websites, so I'm okay with government regulations of spam calls where I'm not okay with comparable regulations of spam websites.

My ideal would be for phone carriers to do block spam calls voluntarily, but that hasn't worked out so far. So my idea is to force phone carriers to identify spam numbers (of both spam callers and spam texters) and to give users the option to delegate blocking of spam numbers to the phone carrier. If the user doesn't want the carrier to block spam, then that's that, though the user can still rely on third-party spam services such as Google's.

Isn't STIR/SHAKEN analogous to reverse path filtering? Is that also a violation of net neutrality?

It's not net neutrality, but it is conceptually related. Net neutrality is the principle that an ISP should treat internet traffic equally regardless of content, sender, or receiver [1]. Put another way, ISPs should not have the discretion to restrict internet traffic or internet access. If your personal concept of net neutrality is limited to an ISPs voluntary decisions, then the court case in the article is merely adjacent to net neutrality.

On the other hand, I believe that the principle of net neutrality should extend to US governments: for the most part, governments should not be allowed to restrict internet traffic or internet access.

1. Internet traffic is speech and expression. The First Amendment makes freedom of expression the default.

2. Internet access is increasingly necessary for work, school, politics beyond a local level, and getting internet access. See appendix A for bonus information.

3. Internet users and websites usually are the people who decide what traffic the users see, government interventions over the content (regarding such as CSAM and copyright infringement) should directly sue users and website owners (and not ISPs), because lawsuits to ISPs rather than to ISP users are less visible to those users and therefore less likely to attract the users' opposition.

4. Letting a government block internet access even for a reason like copyright infringement is a slippery slope toward willful blindness to false positives and excessive punishments. See appendix C for bonus info.

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

Everything below this line is bonus.

Appendix A: Regarding my earlier claim that Internet access is "increasingly necessary": Seeking a sufficiently paying job, never mind working, is hard without internet. Students need internet to get emails, use online learning management systems, collaborate, video call, etc. Fact checking what you read/hear offline or see/hear via internet-less TV about politics beyond a local level is impossible. (Asking a friend to do it for you on the internet is not allowed in this thought experiment.) Getting internet access requires contacting an ISP in the first place, and getting the phone number without visiting the ISPs website is hard without internet.

Appendix B: The net neutrality debate in 2017 was actually a debate about the FCC's entire authority to protect consumers in the internet access market [B1].

> A big part of the FCC’s plan involves rolling back the FCC’s tailor-made authority over broadband providers, then shoveling all remaining government oversight to an FTC ill-equipped to handle it.

> Why is that a problem? The FTC has no rule-making ability, and can only move to protect consumers after a violation has occurred. And that action can only occur if it’s painfully clear that an ISP engaged in “unfair and deceptive” behavior, something that’s easy for an ISP to dodge in the net neutrality era, where anti-competitive behavior is often buried under faux-technical jargon and claims that it was done only for the health and safety of the network.

And let's be clear, internet access remains mostly the same since 2017 (deceptively priced, overpriced, slow, not fiber, data capped, not available in rural places) because states passed net neutrality laws [B2].

[B1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw5d5g/net-neutrality-big-te...

[B2] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/28/courts-again-shoot-down-...

Appendix C: Orrin Hatch wants to destroy the computers of people who commit copyright infringement [C1]. (I kept the Wikipedia bracket citations in the quote so that you can control-F for each paragraph in the original article.)

> Hatch was long a proponent of expanding intellectual property rights and in 1997 introduced the Senate version of the Copyright Term Extension Act.[89] Hatch believed that intellectual property laws should, in general, more closely mirror real property laws, and offer greater protections to authors and creators.[89]

> Hatch caused an overnight controversy on June 17, 2003, by proposing that copyright owners should be able to destroy the computer equipment and information of those suspected of copyright infringement, including file sharing, he stated that "This may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."[90] In the face of criticism, especially from technology and privacy advocates, Hatch withdrew his suggestion days later, after it was discovered that Sen. Hatch's official website was using an unlicensed JavaScript menu from United Kingdom-based software developer Milonic Solutions. Milonic founder Andy Woolley stated that "We've had no contact with them. They are in breach of our licensing terms." Shortly after the publication of that story in Wired magazine, the company that runs Hatch's website contacted Milonic to start registration.

[C1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_prope...

We would switch over to the other ISP

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