
Telco lobbyists accidentally send their talking points - econ4all
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180829/18030740541/that-time-telco-lobbyists-sent-me-all-their-talking-points-about-trying-to-shift-blame-to-internet-companies.shtml
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tptacek
Where are the actual documents? The reasons Masnick gives in the comments are
extremely unconvincing: that there's "non-newsworthy" stuff in them (ok, and?)
and that he doesn't want to do to a Verizon lobbyist what the Intercept did to
Reality Winner.

If he'd just included a link to the documents, I'd have been interested in his
interpretation. But after making a point of how long the 12-page document was,
and then getting only a few quotes, I'm wondering what he's "editorializing"
out of them.

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hundt
From his comment: "There was other info in the document that I don't think is
newsworthy and probably is not worth releasing publicly."

He doesn't literally say it, but I think the implication is that the
information is in some way sensitive or private. I suppose he could have
written that sentence and it would be technically true if the "info" was like,
the weather that day, but I doubt that's what he meant.

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Timmah
I haven't seen a techdirt article on here in years. Were they banned or
something?

~~~
accoil
No, still very much active:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=techdirt.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=techdirt.com)

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adfm
An oldie, but goodie:

"Well, it could happen, you see, if the President of the United States were to
use the power of his office to help us mold public opinion and help us get
that legislation." \--Arlington Hughes

[https://youtu.be/s2NNZdigSXg](https://youtu.be/s2NNZdigSXg)

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OliverJones
Hmm. Companies doing business all over USA like federal regulations: no need
for patchwork compliance. No wonder scaled-up IP packet routing companies want
to prevent states and municipalites from imposing their own regulations.

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stretchwithme
That's just gmail's auto-disclosure feature at work.

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908087
Masnick took what could have been a great piece to use against telcos, and
turned it into an embarrassing attempt to defend Google/Facebook at all costs.
His claim that Google and Facebook know less about you than your ISP would
require you to pretend that encryption and Google Analytics / Facebook's
"pixel" don't exist.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It's worth nothing that the vast majority of Americans have their internet
setup as defaulted. So, every DNS request goes to the ISP's DNS servers (your
ISP knows every single domain you visit regardless of association with
Google/Facebook) and every domain name that doesn't exist winds up at the ISPs
own search/not found landing page. Plus if you use your ISP's email server
(like my mom) who knows if they're reading your email, too.

~~~
908087
DNS requests only give the hostname. Google/Facebook's analytics services get
them pretty much everything about the users' interactions with sites that
include them.

I'm not arguing that ISPs aren't a privacy risk or that they shouldn't be
fought. I'm pointing out that Masnick damages his own credibility by making
stupid claims that, in order to be believed, would require either a
technically unskilled reader or one who is willing to pretend the modern
web/internet works differently than it does.

Masnick attempts to frame this debate in a way where everyone who doesn't join
him in ignoring/defending the privacy violations of Silicon Valley tech
companies is "on the other side". It's a dishonest and shitty way to frame
things, and doesn't reflect reality in any way.

ISPs have plenty of black marks against them. Lying in order to pretend ISPs
are the only ones we should be fighting isn't helping anything.

~~~
snowwrestler
It's a shame you're getting downvoted because you are correct. The dramatic
acceleration of TLS adoption means that your ISP is getting less and less info
about their customers' behaviors.

But if your browser has ever logged into something like Facebook or Google,
then any site with embedded content will be sending info about your behavior
back to them. A LOT of sites carry pixels from those companies, but anything
can do it: an embedded tweet, a YouTube player, a "like" button, etc. This is
on top of the info they collect from your direct interactions with them.

~~~
bretpiatt
He's not correct which is why he's being downvoted. As TLS rolls out further I
suspect you'll see more ISPs move from firewall/router devices being deployed
with their service to an edge proxy under the guise of additional security,
"our new routers terminate all connections before they reach your computer
directly allowing us to block malware and other dangerous packets" \-- while
that statement is 100% true what it doesn't say which is also true is "...and
allows us to see all of the information on all of your sessions and process
that per the terms of our privacy policy".

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tedunangst
Which browsers are going to trust an ISP signing cert?

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bretpiatt
As the ISP I'd pop up a reply asking you to load my certificate into your
browser, example for Chrome:
[https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3505249?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3505249?hl=en)

With a notice informing you if you refuse you won't get the malware blocking
and scanning services to protect you. Depending on the laws the ISP may
require you to accept the certificate in order to pass TLS traffic.

