
AT&T previews lawsuit it plans to file against FCC - Selfcommit
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/att-previews-lawsuit-it-plans-to-file-against-fcc-over-net-neutrality/
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cl42
The Economist's recent article on net neutrality and common carriage is
fascinating and related: [http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-
network-n...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-network-
neutrality-such-intractable-problemand-how-solve-it-gordian-net)

Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea
that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate
between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a
boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to
move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well,
most recently on the internet."

I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of
"common carriage" makes this even more obvious.

~~~
wtallis
The Economist article is written with the presumption that there are are
problems that need non-neutrality in order to be solved and that there is thus
a tradeoff of some sort to be made. They cite better network management, and
give as examples latency-sensitive applications that suffer from the lack of
guaranteed latency.

Those are fallacies. The lack of guaranteed latency is fundamentally no bigger
of a problem than the lack of guaranteed bandwidth. Non-neutral traffic
shaping is not necessary to maintain good performance, and in practice a best-
effort network can achieve acceptable latency for things like VoIP _without_
having to explicitly identify, classify, and prioritize VoIP protocols. ISPs
may be accustomed to using such explicit techniques, but neutral alternatives
exist and work better for general purpose connections, so we shouldn't carve
out any exceptions here.

The Economist also points out the difficulty of determining when traffic is or
should be illegal and blockable. It is not at all apparent to me that ISPs
have a need to be involved in subjective decisions like that in order for us
to have a functional Internet. Is erring on the side of allowing traffic and
prosecuting later _really_ going to cause serious problems, or can we come up
with an objective set of guidelines for what constitutes a DoS worth blocking?

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AnthonyMouse
People keep using DoS as the canonical example of the need for this, but in
that case one of the endpoints is requesting that the traffic be dropped. The
ISP isn't making the decision for anybody.

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wtallis
Except that there isn't actually a real and usable protocol for pushing drop
rules up to your ISP, so in practice you can't authorize your ISP to block a
DoS on your behalf without getting humans involved.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Which is why you pretty much always get humans involved.

How is the ISP even supposed to know it's a DoS otherwise? Maybe you just made
the front page of HN and you want the traffic.

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chasing
Is AT&T trying to muddle the concept of an ISP as something that delivers
content and an ISP as something that hosts content? That's all I can figure,
here.

Especially when writing about the ability to decline service to customers. I'm
not sure how net neutrality relates to AT&T having freedom to pick and choose
its customers. (Surely the folks that just want their content delivered --
Hacker News, for example -- don't consider themselves AT&T customers.)

~~~
rsingel
They are. If they just deliver packets then they are clearly Title II. Last
time the FCC did this (2004/5), the ISPs claimed that their homepages and
email service and DNS made them not "telecommunications".

Well, Gmail, OpenDNS, Google DNS and Facebook (new homepage), make those
arguments less useful. So "caching" is the new DNS.

Not sure how they'll deal with the rise of VPNs and HTTPS though. VPNs and
non-cacheable are the most clear argument that people pay broadband ISPs just
to deliver their packets.

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shmerl
Instead of wasting money on courts AT&T should upgrade all their DSL lines to
fiber optics, lower prices on their plans and increase bandwidth. But of
course they'd rather just whine about how their monopoly is threatened by
Title II. I hope they'll lose big deal.

Though it wouldn't help anything of the above anyway, since even with Title II
AT&T won't be facing much competition. They'd be just more limited in ways
they can abuse their monopoly.

~~~
rayiner
Why should they do that when the FCC is making their product less profitable?

~~~
shmerl
You mean less able to rip off undeserved profits?

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skywhopper
AT&T's argument appears to be that since they are already shaping traffic and
abusing their customer's trust, they aren't actually an Internet service
provider anyway, so they can't be regulated as one.

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sarciszewski
I stopped having any sympathy for AT&T after the Auernheimer case. If they
wanted to garner public support for any reason, a move like this is likely to
kill it for a lot of people. Myself included.

(I know Auernheimer's not well-liked, and I don't agree with his politics, but
he deserved to win that case on appeal.)

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mullingitover
I read the indictment [1]. Auernheimer wasn't a white hat security researcher
--he intentionally went after AT&T with intent to damage them and reap rewards
from it. He's not exactly a martyr for the cause of freedom.

[1]
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/113664772/46-Indictment](http://www.scribd.com/doc/113664772/46-Indictment)

~~~
guelo
An indictment is a deliberately biased, one-sided document.

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Tiksi
_" I have no illusions that any of this will change what happens on February
26," when the FCC is expected to vote, AT&T Federal Regulatory VP Hank
Hultquist wrote in a blog post yesterday. "But when the FCC has to defend
reclassification before an appellate court, it will have to grapple with these
and other arguments. "_

I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is useless
but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?

I'm not familiar with how lawsuits for these kinds of cases work, but wouldn't
this be enough for a judge to throw away any lawsuit they file? If they
clearly state t hey have no intention other than to get in the way, it doesn't
seem like a valid lawsuit to me.

~~~
Alupis
> I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is
> useless but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?

No, he's simply saying this prior release is not going to influence the FCC
vote in any way, shape or form on Feb 26th.

However, a court battle after-wards might (as it did previously with the FCC
National Broadband Act and the courts ultimately ruled the FCC had no
authority to do what they proposed).

~~~
Tiksi
Ah, alright, thanks for the clarification, I guess I did misread it.

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jasonjei
I hope the FCC has the balls to say, "So sue me."

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aioprisan
In other words, this will have to be settled in court.

~~~
rsingel
This is largely political saber rattling. AT&T's best arguments are going to
be procedural.

If FCC gets past arguments it didn't dot the i's, then this will go to the
Supreme Court where AT&T and Verizon will get walloped. I can explain why, but
basically there are 9 votes lined up against the ISPs on reclassification.

~~~
r00fus
I'd love to hear why you think there are 9 votes for reclassification, btw.

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shaftoe
While I don't like Internet providers creating different classes of traffic,
the idea of the government getting involved should terrify anyone who values
innovation and freedom.

Soon, we'll end up with a monopoly guided by regulations from lobbyists and
using laws as a weapon against competition. That's hardly better than the
problem we seek to resolve.

~~~
badsock
Genuinely curious, how would you resolve the problem differently?

~~~
aaron42net
The lack of provider competition isn't a natural monopoly. It's a government-
created monopoly/duopoly in a given market. Instead of regulating the one or
two providers in a market, we could try a different model that improves
competition.

One way is to do city-owned and maintained layer 1, like Chattanooga
([http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chatta...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chattanooga-
internet/)), and sell access to as many ISPs want it.

The other way is to break the city franchise model. Cities generally grant
franchise rights to cable and phone companies, excluding other providers for a
promise of universal coverage and a few percent of the revenue.

The latter is what Google Fiber is asking for from the cities it goes into:

\- It wants blanket access to all of the telephone poles and other right-of-
ways, without having to do per-pole applications, application fees, and
approval process that can take weeks/months each.

\- It wants to not have to do universal access, but rather only roll into
neighborhoods with a high enough density to be profitable.

\- It won't pay the city a percentage of revenue. Instead, it agrees to build
out free internet access to schools, public spaces, etc.

Google Fiber's model has the advantage of not relying on a city to properly
maintain a fiber network, but the disadvantage of leaving poor communities un-
served.

