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Comment by Pilfer | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, this bill only protects net neutrality and does not enforce net neutrality as defined here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality .

ISPs are still allowed to discriminate traffic under this bill. They are allowed to block and throttle content such as illegal streaming downloads, some torrents, spam, and other traffic that degrades network performance. For example, this bill does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade. The bill also does not preclude zero-rating.

This bill is a good thing yes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and call this net neutrality.

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> does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade

Are you really that suprised they block it? It's an exceedingly effective anti-spam measure.

I'm not surprised at all. I bring it up because it's an example of a blatant net neutrality violation that many people agree is acceptable. Same goes for IP ingress filtering.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent network operators from stopping malicious activity on their network.

Blocking Port 25 to specific providers unless they pay up would be a problem, but blocking port 25 globally (except, say, to their own SMTP servers) is perfectly okay.

What the parent is talking about is the more generalized "net-neutrality violation" of assuming that users on residential plans have no legitimate reason to be hosting any public-routable services. It's the ~30-years-back ISP coup of dividing the flat space of Internet "peers" into separate categories of "servers" and "home PCs", where default-deny policies are enforced on "home PCs" to prevent them from doing most of the things "servers" can do.

Theoretically, true "net neutrality" (in quotes because it's not really the same thing that the law that got struck down protected) would require that ISPs not discriminate what types of traffic a customer can use their pipe for, any more than a bank is allowed to discriminate what you use your checking account for.

Under this true-Scotsman net neutrality, ISPs should be required to let people host web servers, or mail servers (if they're not open relays), or whatever-else servers, on their residential Internet. If that causes uplink saturation, then price uplink bandwidth in your plans to match your costs! (Which basically would eliminate the difference between residential and business Internet plans anyway.)

Please direct me to a source explaining why malicious network traffic is exempt from net neutrality. Under the net neutrality definition linked above, blocking specific ports is a clear violation.

Also, the port 25 ban directly affects legitimate customers. At least for Verizon, port 25 is blocked for residential customers, but it's not blocked for commercial customers. Over the past decade, many residential customers have called to enable port 25 so they can run their own mail server, and I've read Verizon refuses to unblock the port. Verizon's "solution" for them is to upgrade to their commercial package where it's not blocked.

> Under the net neutrality definition linked above, blocking specific ports is a clear violation.

I don't see how you can read that from the linked wikipedia page. I assume you're conflating blocking ports with blocking/slowing protocols.

> Please direct me to a source explaining why malicious network traffic is exempt from net neutrality.

It's not an exhaustive policy document of every possible reason why network access might be terminated/restricted. eg no discussion of terminating/filtering BGP peering announcements from a misconfigured device.

Few people, if any, have ever said that network management activities are would be prohibited under NN. If someone is actively disrupting the network, or is otherwise acting maliciously, then clearly as a network operator you're going to be permitted to block that traffic.

> Over the past decade, many residential customers have called to enable port 25 so they can run their own mail server

Sure, but even if they did permit it - the chances you will be able to run a mail relay from an IP that's clearly in the same network block as a bunch of other residential networks is near zero.

Most major mail providers will outright block you for existing in that range, and most others will block you for being unable to demonstrate control over the IP (by setting Reverse-DNS).

> I don't see how you can read that from the linked wikipedia page.

Here's how net neutrality is defined.

"Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication."

Blocking all TCP/IP packets with first two bytes set to 25, and not blocking TCP/IP packets with the first two bytes set to 24, is a clear violation of the Net Neutrality principle of no discrimination based on application. If I send a TCP/IP packet with source port 24, my ISP does not block it. However, if I change just one bit in that packet, my ISP refuses to send it.

An ISP blocking an entire class of applications from the internet (in this case, SMTP servers) is most certainly a net neutrality violation.

> If someone is actively disrupting the network, or is otherwise acting maliciously, then clearly as a network operator you're going to be permitted to block that traffic.

Where specifically in the definition of net neutrality does it permit ISPs to block such traffic? Blocking such traffic is a violation of the net neutrality principle that "Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same".

> Most major mail providers will outright block you for existing in [a residential IP block]

ISPs have blocked residential customers from using SMTP for over a decade now, therefore it's no surprise mail providers have little incentive to support residential SMTP servers. They've been forced out of the market.

Claiming network operators must route unlawful traffic is a solid strategy for ensuring the death of net neutrality.

ISPs should be dumb pipes. They should not be inspecting nor blocking packets and should transmit data regardless of its content.

The alternative, that ISPs should not route unlawful traffic, would require ISPs to search packets and block the ones they find unlawful. That is censorship.

You're going to find it a hard road to convince anyone that ISPs shouldn't be able to perform standard network management activities on their network.

It's also extremely unhelpful to bring it up in the context of NN.

Using weasel words like "standard network management" doesn't imply those standards conform to net neutrality principles. It's clear that that some of those standards, such blanket blocking port 25, are a direct violation of net neutrality.

I did notice you tried earlier to change the definition of net neutrality by claiming it "doesn't prevent network operators from stopping malicious activity on their network", when really there is no exception for this. Like netflix tried to do, you can't decide what is and what isn't net neutrality just to fit your viewpoint.

I fully understand why you're trying to avoid this topic by describing at as "extremely unhelpful" because I know it's a sore point many people try to avoid discussing. But I have no qualms pointing out flaws in other people's arguments :).

the negation of "operators must block all unlawful traffic" is "operators are permitted to not block all unlawful traffic", not "operators must not block any traffic on the basis of it being unlawful."

I'm aware. Either way it's still censorship.

> Please direct me to a source explaining why malicious network traffic is exempt from net neutrality

All the Net Neutrality legislation proposals I've seen contain explicit wording to the effect of "lawful network traffic". If malicious traffic violates the CFAA or CAN-SPAM, they would be in their right to block it.

Comcast of course blocks incoming port 25 as well. I pay to have easydns deliver over SMTP to an alternate port. This means I can't really do effective spam filtering / denying at the connection level as the connecting server is always easydns. (Although denying spam that then bounces often is misidentified as originating spam... so...)

What best practices do others do when still hosting SMTP at home?

> The bill also does not preclude zero-rating

I know I'm in the minority, but I've never seen zero rating as part of NN.

What I worry about is people playing games where services are slowed or blocked.

I don't see any real point in including zero rating under net neutrality, for several reasons.

1. The usual argument is that if an ISP can zero rate service X, that makes it harder for competitors of X to compete, and so we need to ban zero rating to encourage competition.

This argument fails because a last mile ISP like Comcast can easily side step any internet neutrality rules in offering X by making a deal with the X provider to serve the service from Comcast's own servers. Then it is not being provided over internet and so is out of scope for net neutrality.

They could even go farther, and not even use IP at all to deliver it from Comcast to the home. They run IP on top of lower level protocols, and they could use one of those lower level protocols to deliver to an app running on the set top box, which could then serve on the LAN using normal IP protocols (which would be out of scope for net neutrality because they are just running on a LAN in this case).

If we want to stop this for competition reasons, we'll need to use antitrust, not net neutrality. Antitrust cannot be evaded by simply changing the protocols.

2. We accept zero rating in every other or nearly every other common carrier service. In telecommunications. for example, I've never seen any objections to zero rated telephone service, whether paid for by the phone company (such as free calls to government offices), or paid for by the company called (commercial toll free numbers). In transportation, we don't get our feathers ruffled when a bus or cab company offers free rides (possibly paid for by a sponsor). What is different about internet?

Generalizing this, in general we allow nearly every provider of goods and services to give you MORE than you have paid for. As long as they deliver the service that you paid for, if they want to give you a gift of more service to promote a particular offering of their own, or to promote (possibly for pay) some sponsor, we allow it. Regulation is concerned with making sure they don't under deliver, not preventing over delivery.

It is hard to make a case to the typical consumer that there is something fundamentally different between, say, Safeway giving a discount on Pepsi, and an ISP giving a discount on bandwidth used for Spotify.

3. Suppose I'm a company selling something that uses a lot of bandwidth, such as a game that requires a large download. I'd like to pay major ISPs to zero rate it. If I cannot directly do that, but the ISP sells prepaid bandwidth cards that you use by entering a code from the card, I could simply buy prepaid bandwidth this way, and when someone buys my game I could give them a bandwidth code for their ISP to cover the costs of the download. Are we going to ban prepaid bandwidth to stop this?

If we want to get net neutrality back, and have it STAY back instead of just flipping every time we change which party is in control we need to keep it to just involving things ON the network. That's basically throttling, blocking, and paid prioritization. Billing is OFF the network. I think it should be reasonably possible to get bipartisan support for those.

The argument for prohibiting zero-rating under NN generally goes like this:

If provider X provides a very limited (or no) quota for regular internet traffic, and provides access to sponsored zero-rated services - then this inhibits competition, and (depending on how agressively it's implmented) can inhibit free speech.

This has been seen seen in some countries such as India where facebook.com was zero-rated traffic, and data prices for regular internet access were extremely high.

It's also seen today in Australia where Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play Music services are zero-rated traffic on certain mobile (cellular) plans - many of these plans also have zero-rated access to various popular social media platforms too (facebook, instagram, etc) - and data quotas are generally fairly limited (2-10GB/month is typical for mid-range plans). A competitor to these services is going to have a very hard time entering the market, since their customers will all have the data usage come out of their regular quota.

Continuing with Australia - Most ISPs provide zero-rated access to Netflix (or provide 'unlimited' quota). Telstra does not zero-rate Netflix traffic, but they do zero-rate Foxtel and their own movie/tv services. At the same time, having rather low data quotas.

So those who're stuck with Telstra (eg because they live in an apartment/development that is a Telstra-exclusive estate, or just because they're on a 24-36 month contract, having been unaware of the problems) - are unable to use Netflix.

With Australia, submarine transport costs to Singapore (nearest 'major' Internet hub) or all the way to North America or Europe for the largest hubs is an order of magnitude more expensive than continental terrestrial transport within North America or within Europe. So that Netflix offers free caching boxes to ISP's meeting minimum traffic levels allows the Australian networks to save substantially on their overall bandwidth costs. It's reasonable for them to zero-rate that traffic as they're effectively passing their cost savings on to their customers, as opposed to trying to double dip by charging content networks for access to their subscribers. This may violate more pure definitions of net neutrality, but should be desirable behaviour as it's pro consumer.

This goes back to the distinction between the real problem, the lack of competition in many markets compared to net neutrality which mitigates situations where there's a lack of competition, but it's not necessarily a win all across the board. What's needed is to separate last mile access, from eyeball network service, from carrier network service, from content network service, from actual content. This would ensure competition across the board, and prevent excessive power accumulated by such a small number of large corporations as is currently the case. However, the nearly religious reverence to capitalism in the US would make such a solution nearly impossible to legislate.

> With Australia, submarine transport costs to Singapore (nearest 'major' Internet hub)

There's very little direct bandwidth to Singapore - there's only one cable going west (SEA-ME-WE-3), it's old, and constantly has breaks.

Unless you live in Western Australia, your traffic (even to Singapore) doesn't go via that - it goes via the US over SXC or Endeavor to the east, or to the north to Guam (PIPE-1) or Japan (AJC)

> It's reasonable for them to zero-rate that traffic as they're effectively passing their cost savings on to their customers, as opposed to trying to double dip by charging content networks for access to their subscribers. This may violate more pure definitions of net neutrality, but should be desirable behaviour as it's pro consumer.

I agree, however I've had (heated) arguments with people on this aspect. Not everyone agrees, and thinks that all traffic should be zero-rated if any traffic is going to be.

If that were the cause, then all ISPs would provide zero rating for netflix. Instead, only certain ISPs zero rate netflix, suggesting that those ISPs are being payed to do this.

T-Mobile zero rates in the US as a technical measure, and all content that adheres to their technical requirements is eligible for zero rating (even adult content).

Are you talking about the Binge-On service[1]? That's an optional service on both the customer and provider side.

Either way, there's no additional charges on the customer or provider side.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html

Then it is not being provided over internet and so is out of scope for net neutrality.

This needs to be explained. If the zero-rated service is being provided as part of the same subscription, I don't see why it matter where the servers are located.

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