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Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

I generally consider myself very politically liberal but the idea of the government controlling all internet infrastructure is truly bone-chilling. At least with many ISPs owning the lines we have some semblance of possibility that government tampering with information would be noticed. If all traffic passed through a single entity’s control, we’re only a slippery slope away from the Great Firewall of USA. Probably justified by either preventing terrorism or CSAM.

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Other countries with filtering regimes just obligate their private ISPs to block, eg, torrent trackers or Facebook or whoever. Governments have plenty of leverage over ISPs already, namely that ISPs have employees, addresses and hardware they can seize.

There's no reason to believe that commercial entities would be any less likely to spy on you than a government entity. The government can just pass security regulations that require access to infrastructure with gag orders in place so the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to talk about government access requests or actions.

The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.

As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?

In the US at least this would require a court order, the government cannot just blanket search all private communications a priori.

They can and do though...

The Snowden leaks proved otherwise. That was over a decade ago, it's wild that everyone just forgot it all and then went back to framing the same fears as hypothetical.

This ownership model doesn't necessarily give the government access to the contents of your communication. It could be gov-owned dark fiber, rented and lit by private parties at each end.

Edward Snowden revealed this was all already happening under robust private industry.

Privatizing publicly built infrastructure did not inoculate us from surveillance.

To actually do it we need to exercise control through the collective mechanism we call government. Laws, regulation, oversight, audits, sunshine policies. It's the only way to curb it. Mistrusting your only mechanism of control and putting blind faith into private markets did not work. We tried it. It failed.

When the government is the one pressuring AT&T to have a secret room, how is the government going to save you from it?

The actual problem is the centralization, regardless of whether it's public or private. There shouldn't be two ISP options, there should be a thousand, so that anyone wanting to compromise all the traffic has to compromise a thousand independent entities, some of which can then be operated by stubborn curmudgeons who would rather loudly go to jail than silently betray the public.

So the options are

A. Break up the companies, assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen, consolidations never happens and that someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point

B. Change the law

It's important to note that AT&T was broken up and there once was many mobile carriers and there were many surveillance and spy programs going on during that time unabated and then they just bought each other up.

So instead of wishing on a hope and a dream that some invisible hands will orchestrate unexplainable market magic, let's just change the law. There's actual historical evidence of that working.

> assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen

Or just prohibit them. That's a change to the law you can actually see is being enforced.

The problem with changing the spying law is that the spying is happening in secret, so there is no way to verify that they're not lying to you as they have in the past. Laws with no accountability mechanism are a farce. They need to be backstopped by verifiable structural inhibitions on the practice, like diverse decentralized infrastructure subject to competitive pressure and plausible independent reimplementation by anyone who doesn't trust the incumbents.

> someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point

This is required to turn back injustice. But it's more likely to be achieved the more people have the opportunity to do it.

They already tap into every cable, no matter whether they own it or not. See NSA breaking into Google datacenters and wiretapping cables. Granted, they were only able to do this because the internal traffic was not encrypted. Still, global traffic analysis is nothing to scoff at, and with enough surveilance points privacy becomes almost nonexistent, even in the presence of encryption.

Why build 4 sets of lines when you can build 1? Isn’t this literally the reason why broad swaths of the US have zero competition?

Resilience? Exactly the thing which is being optimized out of much critical infrastructure.

Laying down competing bundles along the same path gains you very little resilience.

For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.

It's easier to build resilience as a single network or organization than by "hoping" to have that with two different ISPs (who will obviously both of taken the cheapest route dig wise between A and B). If I need two diverse fiber paths between points X and Y, I can go to one provider who can contractually guarantee diversity. For example, they can ensure that maintenance work on Circuit 1 is not scheduled at the same time as Circuit 2, and that the paths are never less than X metres between them, as they are fully aware of the two paths.

The one ISP is not going to do that automatically, because it costs more. Then only banks and others willing to pay a massive premium get it. And sometimes even they don't, because they run completely redundant fiber paths along different streets and then use the same OEM's equipment on both of them and a bad software update takes them both out at once, or their union goes on strike and cuts power to the whole operation before they walk out.

Meanwhile diverse ISPs wouldn't be using the same A and B. ISP A has a central office in a high rise downtown, ISP B primarily targets single family homes and has their switching equipment on a piece of land next to a substation in suburbia, so if you subscribe to both you not only have links coming from opposite directions, they're each operated by independent organizations instead of a monoculture.

That might be your perception, but let me give you real life state of affairs in the UK.

In the last decade a number of ISPs have popped up and decided to fibre up areas. They are invariably buying OLTs from Nokia or Adtran (the same two vendors as BT OR) putting them in a BT OR exchange because that is cheap and very convenient, good access to backhaul etc and then renting BT OR ducts and poles to install the fibre in/on (PIA). To top it off they often are using the same fibre vendor as BT and sometimes even the same contractors to install it. Worked example of this; netomia/youfibre (though there are dozens).

What resilience are we really gaining here? Organisational, and that's pretty much it.

You've created an environment where there is a single large incumbent and the ability and incentive for anyone else to piggyback on their existing infrastructure.

Now suppose that anyone could run an ISP out of their house. They wire up a few of their neighbors and then make a single long-distance run to one of many backhaul providers, none of which has a dominant market position like BT. The backhaul providers connect to their customers and each other in telco hotels, but they're smaller and more numerous because each of the largest providers has their own, so the city has three or four instead of one.

Meanwhile even if you have a BT, organizational independence in itself is better than nothing.

Are there western countries with no incumbent telecom provider?

It is a fine concept but you'd have to actually ban infrastructure sharing between ISPs and be building a completely Greenfield network. Quite theoretical. I'm aware of former eastern bloc countries that have dynamics somewhat reminiscent of what you describe though.

It's not that you have to prohibit it, it's that you have to somehow break their existing monopoly if it already exists, and it's easy to choose rules that don't actually break it but instead cause it to be a de facto utility again. So for example, if the incumbent has a monopoly on transit or interconnection, you have a problem because they could just charge prohibitive rates and bankrupt all their competitors. And prohibitive rates are same thing as banning them from using it, aren't they? It's what happens by default. But then the competitors can't get off the ground because the incumbent has a vertically integrated monopoly.

You could require them to provide those services for their competitors at regulated rates, but then you're not actually breaking that monopoly, you're just regulating it while cementing it in place.

If you have an existing monopolist then first you have to thoroughly break them up, not just mitigate the continued existence of the monopoly.

And then Circuit 1 and Circuit 2 are taken down at the same time because even though they have diverse paths they're part of the same underlying DWDM system which has just encountered a fault.

Ensuring there isn't a single point of failure is not just as simple as 'putting it in the contract.' Carriers can and have groomed their primary and backup circuit on to the same L1 path without realizing it.

That should only happen if your protection is at the optical layer which hasn't been common for a decade or more, partly for that reason.

I've never seen it happen in 20 years. Although of course small parts of the path change over time and sometimes that means bits get put in the same duct for a short run but that also happens when you buy from different providers to be honest. With some carriers you can insist they send you updated route kmls when they change either path and you can detect the change as you'll see different losses/otdr traces before and after a maintenance/fix.

In london I used to have 4 different physical fibre providers available plus one which is fibre to the building and cat5e to the prem. At a retail level there were hundreds of providers to choose from.

Most of the country has more than one physical fibre (or FTTB/FTTC/CATV) provider available.

Ironically, the internet is a US government project that was opened up to external participation. The US government has historically controlled significant parts of core internet infrastructure, and didn't fully hand over control of the internet until October 1, 2016.

Governments already control private ISPs and compel them to have the capability to tap massive amounts of data, IIRC 1%. Were also talking about owning the lines not the actual switching and routing, in either case the taps would likely be placed at the ISPs offices.

Does the fact that the government controls most road infrastructure in the country make you concerned about freedom of travel?

The government could own the physical fiber without controlling the crypto at the endpoints.

Exactly. Govt owning physical fibre in a P2P network (i.e one fibre back to the pop per user) is perfectly fine because an ISP can encrypt between the pop and the user (that comes as standard with pon for example) but anything* involving active equipment is a massive no no in my view.

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