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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

> Initially, the company said too many customers had requested the sites be blocked, so it would block them for all customers except for those who called the company and requested access. However, the company backtracked on Monday and said those who didn't request the sites be blocked would still have access.

Cool.

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I am super confused. If a user wants to "block" the site, can they not just visit the site ?

If you want to browse the web with JS enabled, you'll be making lots of requests to Google and Facebook whether you want to or not (analytics, like/share buttons, etc). The most convenient way to stop them is to run something like a Pi-Hole so that those requests never reach Google/Facebook. An ISP offering that as a service sounds like a nice feature.

I would think the people knowledgable enough to know their browser is making requests to FB without actually visiting FB would also be knowledgable enough to block it themselves (with their hosts file, ublock, etc) and not need the ISP to do so.

I could be completely wrong, I’m no expert on North Idaho corporate politics; however, my thoughts are that the confusion is arising from your assumption that this is a practical move, rather than a political one

The users in question likely wanted the site blocked for everyone, not just themselves.

The email says users didn't want it in their internet "feed," so... this is a load of nonsense. I'm highly skeptical that anyone contacted them about blocking facebook in the first place.

Next thing you'd say "if you don't like somebody's tweets, can't you just not read their twitter feed?"! You're treading on dangerous grounds here, comrade.

That requires you to learn about computers and only technocrats like bezos and Tim cook know that stuff.

It's like people have never heard the word "boycott"

I wonder if the productivity of the people who requested the sites to be blocked went up significantly? :)

It's quite generous to attribute productivity to people who call their ISP to get a website blocked that they could just stop using.

So it's only blocking for people who requested such blocking, then the title is just click bait, I guess "ISP let's it's users block websites they dislike" is not as catchy.

The ISP backtracked after saying they'd block it for everyone, which is what the article actually says.

I guess "reading the entire article" isn't as catchy as trying to get a quip in the the HN comments.

So why would they send out an email taking a position on these two sites? And why did that email say that the block applied to all customers?

I think they are back-pedaling after seeing the public response.

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