Rob Pegoraro

"When's the last time your ISP blocked you from a legal web site?" FCC commissioner Nathan Simington asks at #SOTN2023. "Your ISP isn't stopping you from connecting to any of those things."

That is a respectable argument against net-neutrality rules--that the danger of ISPs tampering with traffic is over. But if you make that, you have to admit that ISPs seriously talked for many years about doing just that.

Mar 6, 2023 at 6:42pmWeb
Show threadmarkMar 6, 2023
@robpegoraro like alt.bin.boneless ? Cuz all of alt.bin got blackholed all at once, not because it was gone, but because isps friends had had enough of usenet
Show threadRob PegoraroMar 6, 2023
@ATLeagle Can't say I spent any time in that binaries hierarchy! But I also can't say I was surprised at the time to see ISPs drop binaries newsgroups from their news servers first--before dropping Usenet outright.
Show threadINVISVMar 6, 2023
@robpegoraro And some of the possible TikTok bans would bring us right back to this: potentially having network operators / network services blocking content.
Show threadRob PegoraroMar 6, 2023
@invisv Wouldn't it be governments doing the blocking then? (Which I do not think is remotely okay or even constitutional.)
Show threadINVISVMar 6, 2023

@robpegoraro Yes and no. It would be the ISP doing the blocking, whether or not it was government mandated. There are also gray areas of this, both domestically and abroad. Domestically, yes it would be triggered by a law that bans a site or content, but the current TikTok bans that are being proposed are somewhat vague as to the implementation. (And some, like the executive orders that were overturned a couple of years back had an anti-circumvention clause, which ISPs might have taken to mean that they had to do blocking.)

In semi-authoritarian countries, companies learn that they need to color within the lines or else the government cracks down on them in various ways.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/23/tik-tok-ban-us-congress-china/

Congressional TikTok Bans Won't Stop China's Data Gathering

The ban would hurt Americans—and there are better ways to protect their data.

Foreign Policy