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President Trump's Supreme Court nominee argued last year that net neutrality rules violate the First Amendment rights of Internet service providers by preventing them from "exercising editorial control" over Internet content.
Trump's pick is Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The DC Circuit twice upheld the net neutrality rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission under former Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite Kavanaugh's dissent. (In another tech-related case, Kavanaugh ruled that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata is legal.)
While current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai eliminated the net neutrality rules, Kavanaugh could help restrict the FCC's authority to regulate Internet providers as a member of the Supreme Court. Broadband industry lobby groups have continued to seek Supreme Court review of the legality of Wheeler's net neutrality rules even after Pai's repeal.
[...] Consumers generally expect ISPs to deliver Internet content in un-altered form. But Kavanaugh argued that ISPs are like cable TV operators—since cable TV companies can choose not to carry certain channels, Internet providers should be able to choose not to allow access to a certain website, he wrote.
"Internet service providers may not necessarily generate much content of their own, but they may decide what content they will transmit, just as cable operators decide what content they will transmit," Kavanaugh wrote. "Deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN and deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN.com are not meaningfully different for First Amendment purposes."
Kavanaugh's argument did not address the business differences between cable TV and Internet service.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday July 15 2018, @02:30PM (1 child)
Here's the problem with your solution: It in no way matches reality.
Where you live, odds are you have about 2-5 options for Internet connectivity. The players are likely to be (a) a major cable company such as Comcast or Spectrum, (b) a major telecom such as AT&T, and (c) a satellite provider or two with a slow-as-heck uplink.
Now, let's say the government wants to censor a website you like. So they call up their buddies at AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum, and a half-dozen other big ISPs and say "Hey, can you block all traffic to the IPs pointed to by this domain name? We'll give you $X for your trouble. And don't tell anybody you did it." The ISPs will likely say "Sure!", because:
(a) The website in question may not be popular enough that they could even potentially lose more than $X in revenue for blocking that website.
(b) Lots of customers will be pissed, but not pissed enough to leave.
(c) If the ISP I work for censors xyz.com, odds are the other ISPs are also censoring xyz.com. So the pissed off customers who leave my service will be balanced out by the pissed off customers leaving my competitors' service to try me out.
(d) If the ISP doesn't do it, somebody is sure to say, in public, "Pure-As-Snow ISP, Inc is allowing TERRORISTS to get their message out!" which will be a big PR hassle at best.
So, even if you decide that you're really going to change ISPs, and go through the time, hassle, and expense of doing so, you'll find that your favorite website is still blocked.
And of course after a few dozen rounds of this, I'm sure folks at both the government and the ISPs will make efforts to automate this exchange, to save time and valuable staff resources. So now at the press of a button, some boffin can decide on a whim what you can't see (not "aren't allowed to see", but "cannot see", and you can be certain that workarounds like Tor are first on their blocklist). And with no regulatory changes and nobody acting against their self-interest and no public knowledge beyond "Hey I can't see my favorite website anymore!", you've now built a Great Firewall of America.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 15 2018, @08:13PM
VPN
That's enterprise, and will always be excluded from manipulation. You have execs (1st class citizens) that require business connections in residential areas. Nothing new about it.
The ISPs can't see jack diddly shit to block anything, without hugely expensive realtime deep packet inspection on heavily encrypted connections with multiple layers involved.
Only drawback is that you pay more for the connection, but freedom these days is only available to the upper classes anyways.
All of my packets leaving my residence exit my office before going on the Internet, and that is a direct tap not monitored or manipulated. All the really interesting activity exits northern Europe, and is sent back to me across two VPNs.
Comcast can burn in hell and they will never succeed in controlling my packets. They are forced to be a common carrier.
-- ediii