[governance] IGP Alert: "Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance"

Suresh Ramasubramanian suresh at hserus.net
Tue Nov 13 22:07:10 EST 2007


Karl Auerbach wrote:

> You have to be *extremely* careful - the way that the law you cited is
> written makes the outcome very, very tightly tied to the way that the
> factual situation fits the tricky definitions in the code.

Oh, fully agree - but that is the closest you get to a code that provides
for safe harbor, for good samaritan filtering efforts.  And these are on a
best effort basis.

> (There's an interesting reverse twist to this - companies here in the
> US could be considered liable if they do not filter out bad stuff and it
> causes an employee to consider himself/herself to be thus subject to
> sexual harassment.)

Under other laws certainly - OSHA regulations on workplace health / safety,
HIPAA / COPPA / Sarbanes Oxley etc .. for businesses. Haven't seen a lot of
those get applied to customers of email services / ISPs providing email.
 
> But the picture I have in my mind is packet-forwarding providers,
> whether near the edge or in the core, that decide to move up the stack
> and add spam filtering.

Well, as I mentioned somewhere upthread, there is precious little or none of
that that goes on.  Unless that provider explicitly appears in an MX record,
or is otherwise contracted to do so by the ISP that asks for such a service,
that doesn't go on.

> stream rate of 5 to 15 mbits/second was heavily multiplied].  I suspect
> that the cumulative bit rate for video on the net is rather larger
> these days, especially since IP multicast has kinda disappeared.

Yup. See the mrtg graphs for video.google.com / limelight / youtube etc (at
least some of this periodically turns up in nanog presentations)

> But we're drifting a bit here - the point I started with we need to
> find a way so that users can know what filters are being applied, have
some
> way of saying "no" (which perhaps might mean moving to another carrier),

It just doesn't scale for ISPs to exempt specific users from a filter and
provide a completely unfiltered feed. A good complaints / false positive
handling process is of course needed, so that when there is a report of
inappropriately blocked email, the filter or block that caused the email to
be inappropriately blocked is addressed, or information given for why the
block was appropriate (for example the blocked server was hacked into and
used to relay spam).

	srs

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