debanqued

The elitist idea that it’s okay to exclude people from public service for not having property cannot be framed as “harm reduction” when in fact it fails at that. The people who have mobile phones and subscriptions are the same people who can afford Wi-Fi at home, data plans, etc. These are people who are already served by the private marketplace. You merely give them a convenience at the expense of spending money in a way that marginalises the needy. It’s not just discrimination you advocate -- the money is poorly allocated when it should go toward serving precisely those you exclude; the ones underserved by the private sector. By catering for the more privileged you only introduce harm by creating a false baseline that harms the excluded groups even more. Libraries were more inclusive 10 years ago, before they needlessly introduced these SMS-imposing captive portals. And some still are inclusive. Some poorly managed libraries have gone in an exclusive direction and this trend is spreading.

We’re at #2.

Who? Which library is at #2? Some libraries are entirely inclusive and treat everyone equally. Some libraries have regressed and have no pressure to join the inclusive world. You’re opposing the pressure that’s needed to make them better. That’s not helpful.. that just enables the problem to worsen.

Having services for some rather than none is quintessential harm reduction.

No it’s not. It increases the harm. We have already reached a point where many governments assume everyone is online and they have used that assumption to remove offline services. So people who are excluded are further harmed by the exclusivity as it creates more exclusivity. If a public service cannot be inclusive then nixing it ensures the infrastucture is in place to compensate knowing that the service is not in place.

extremely childish and harmful.

Elitism is extremely childish and harmful. Respect for human rights is socially responsible. It’s the adult stance.

Unified Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21:

“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

If a library is exclusive the threat of defunding has two outcomes:

• compliance -- to become inclusive and (if necessary) show the door to elitists therein who think it’s okay to exclude people
• closure (unrealistic, see below)

Either outcome is better than directing public money toward exclusive services. In the case of closure, the same money can rightfully be redirected toward other libraries that are inclusive.

Compliance splits into two possible outcomes:

• exclusive services dropped entirely; inclusive services like book/media access continue
• exclusive services reworked to become inclusive

Both of those are better outcomes than inequality. Dropping an exclusive service invites pressure to fix it. In any case, the elitism of exclusive public service is unacceptible because it undermines human rights.

(edit) One thing I did not consider is the exclusive services getting non-public funding. If Wi-Fi is going to be exclusive/elitist, perhaps it’s fair enough to continue as such as long as Google or Apple finances it. The private sector is littered with exclusivity and that doesn’t pose a human rights issue. In any case it’s an injustice if one dime of public money goes toward a service that is exclusive, which has the perversion of potentially excluding someone whose tax funded it.

I’m scared.

The irony, hypocrisy, and injustice here is that the UN’s own website itself discriminates against some demographics of people and denies access to the UDHR of 1948:

And this same UN will be creating the Digital Global Compact.

There is no valid reason for the United Nations blocking Tor.

A mom & pop shop selling cupcakes would have a valid reason (lack of funding, lack of competence, no conflicting principles). Blocking Tor is a cheap and sloppy attempt at separating ham from spam which inherently entails blocking ham, ultimately against the principles the UN theoretically supports. The UN should have the funding and competence to support their own values.

The UN probably should not be drafting rules about digital inclusion when they themselves have an embarrassing display of digital exclusion.

I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.

The medium.com portion of the URL should be replaced by scribe.rip to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.

Anyone who just wants the answer: see @[email protected]’s comment in this thread.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

Interstate commerce is governed by the federal government.

Not exclusively. Interstate commerce implies that the feds can regulate it, not that they have exclusive power to do so. We see this with MJ laws. The fed believes it has the power to prohibit marijuana on the basis of interstate commerce, but in fact mj can be grown locally, sold locally, and consumed locally. Just like internet service can be.

Suppose you want to buy a stun gun in New York. You can find stun guns sold via mail order from another state (thus interstate commerce), but New York still managed to ban them despite the role of interstate commerce.

A close analog would be phone laws. The fed has the TCPA to protect you from telemarketers, but at the same time various states add additional legal protections for consumers w.r.t. telemarketing and those laws have force even if the caller is outside the country. (Collecting on the judgement is another matter).

Schools now require the internet for kids. ISPs being allowed to be anything more than a dumb pipe means they have the control of what information is sent across their network.

Education is specifically a duty of the state set out in the Constitution. If you can point to the statute requiring schools to provide internet for students, I believe it will be state law not federal law that you find.

The internet is now a basic human right in the United States for numerous reasons, one of which is #2.

I don’t quite follow. Are you saying that because education is a human right, that internet access is a human right? It doesn’t work that way. First of all, people who do not exercise their right to an education would not derive any rights implied by education. As for the students, if a state requires internet in education that does not mean that internet access becomes a human right. E.g. an Amish family might lawfully opt to homeschool their child, without internet. That would satisfy the right to education enshrined in the Unified Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) just fine. A student attending public school in a state that mandates internet in schools would merely have the incidental privilege of internet access, not an expanded human right that students in other states and countries do not have under the same human rights convocation. If your claim were true, it would mean that California (for example) requiring internet provisions for students would then mean students in Haiti (a country that also signed the UDHR that entitles people to a right to education) or Texas would gain a right to internet access via the state of California’s internal law. A state cannot amend the UDHR willy nilly like that.

Also, if internet could be construed as a human right by some mechanism that’s escaping me, the fed is not exclusively bound by human rights law. The fed signed the treaty, but all governments therein (state and local) are also bound to uphold human rights. Even private companies are bound to human rights law in the wording of the text, though expectation of enforcement gets shaky.

ISPs cross state boundaries and should be governed by interstate law.

I subscribed to internet service from a WISP at one point. A dude in my neighborhood rolled out his own ISP service. His market did not even exceed the city.

The local ISPs have ISPs themselves and as you climb the supply chain eventually you get into the internet backbone which would be interstate, but that’s not where the netneutrality problem manifests. The netneutrality problem is at the bottom of the supply chain in the last mile of cable where the end user meets their local ISP.

Also with MJ laws, several states have liberated the use of marijuana despite the feds using the interstate commerce act to ban it.

An ISP being a business, especially a publicly-traded one, will sacrifice all manner of consumer/user-protection in order to maximize profit. And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

Sure, and if the fed is relaxed because the telecoms feed the warchests of the POTUS and Congress, you have a nationwide shit-show. A progressive state can fix that by imposing netneutrality requirements. Just like many states introduce extra anti-telemarketing laws that give consumers protection above and beyond the TCPA.

And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

That’s a problem for the ISPs that benefits consumers. If ISPs operating in different states then have to adjust their framework for one state that mandates netneutrality, the cost of maintaining different frameworks in different states becomes a diminishing return. US consumers often benefit from EU law in this way. The EU forced PC makers to make disassembly fast and trivial, so harmful components could quickly and cheaply be removed before trashing obsolete hardware. The US did not impose this. Dell was disturbed because they had to make pro-environment adjustments as a condition to access to the EU market. They calculated that it would be more costly to sell two different versions, so the PCs they made for both the EU market and the US market become more eco-friendly. Thanks to the EU muddying the waters.

The right to repair will have the same consequences.

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

• Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
• The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
• The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?

/cc @[email protected]

Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.