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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022 announced that it would start politely asking the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes with usage caps or “overage fees.”
Initially just a voluntary measure, bigger ISPs had to start using the labels back in April. Smaller ISPs had to start using them as of October 10. In most instances they’re supposed to look something like this [image].
As far as regulatory efforts go, it’s not the worst idea. Transparency is lacking in broadband land, and U.S. broadband and cable companies have a 30+ year history of ripping off consumers with an absolute cavalcade of weird restrictions, fees, surcharges, and connection limitations.
Here’s the thing though: transparently knowing you’re being ripped off doesn’t necessarily stop you from being ripped off. A huge number of Americans live under a broadband monopoly or duopoly, meaning they have no other choice in broadband access. As such, Comcast or AT&T or Verizon can rip you off, and you have absolutely no alternative options that allow you to vote with your wallet.
That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if U.S. federal regulators had any interest in reining in regional telecom monopoly power, but they don’t. In fact, members of both parties are historically incapable of even admitting monopoly harm exists. Democrats are notably better at at least trying to do something, even if that something often winds up being decorative regulatory theater.
The other problem: with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, telecoms and their Republican and libertarian besties are currently engaged in an effort to dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this unleashes “free market innovation.” It, of course, doesn’t; regional monopolies like Comcast just double down on all of their worst impulses, unchecked.
If successful, even fairly basic efforts like this one won’t be spared, as the FCC won’t have the authority to enforce much of anything.
It’s all very demonstrative of a U.S. telecom industry that’s been broken by monopoly power, a lack of competition, and regulatory capture. As a result, even the most basic attempts at consumer protection are constantly undermined by folks who’ve dressed up greed as some elaborate and intellectual ethos.
![this [image]](https://i0.wp.com/www.techdirt.com/wp-content/uploads/2030/01/1.webp?w=619&ssl=1){kind=link}
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31 2024, @04:12AM (1 child)
Presumably you've encountered articles about police using DNS records from the ISP to track and prosecute suspects. Can't do much calling someone a criminal based on their DNS history, but you've heard of it before, right?
ISPs gather the data. It costs money to store data, though.. so ISPs will.. monetize that data. Sell it. To the highest bidder. (Of the moment. Anyone. Everyone. All the bidders. Make an offer. It's bad business to not take your money.) DNS information. When most of your data flows - they know when you're at home, what your sleep schedule looks like, when you're getting up early or home early or home sick. Ads.
DNS will give them a lot. Where you do most of your shopping. (target.com? local flyers. Amazon? maybe ads more for tech co's.) It will tell them your political affiliations. Based on the sites you go to, your racial profile, your wing'ed-ness, religions. You can be correlated with others in the area. Just from DNS information.
And of course, they know, based on torrent swarm and trackers, whether you watch a lot of movies, TV, stream, or none of the above. It'll be sold for advertising.
There was an article about 23andme going bankrupt -- what will happen to all that private, private DNA data?!?!?!? Heh. It's an asset. The creditors will get it. The creditors will do what creditors do best: they'll sell it. For as much as they can possibly get, for as long and recurring as they possibly can. It's an "asset", not a "liability" -- the DNA data will be assigned to creditors.
Your DNS information is an "asset", not a "liability". It will be monetized.
Feeling good about DNSSEC now?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 31 2024, @03:22PM
There is a subtle difference in that 23andme is going bankrupt because almost any possible profitable use of the data is illegal under currently existing federal law so they can't make any money.
If they could scam using the data, they already would, and would not be going bankrupt, so it would not be possible to worry about scammers making money, LOL very chicken and egg.
Also its HIPPA federally protected medical data even if it wasn't specifically genetic data, there's just not much they can do with it that's not an open-and-shut legal case.
On the other hand DNS data, well that's about as close to unregulated as you can imagine. Not accepting money by selling the data to North Korea ... not much regulation IIRC.
Also DNSSEC provides minimal privacy. Its hard/impossible to MITM, but if your ISP sees DNSSEC traffic to IP address 45.54.66.1 that's ns01.gannett-dns.com so they DO know you're a Gannet newspaper reader. I only picked on them because they own my local legacy newspaper and of course the domain is not DNSSEC signed.
Cloudflare has a tolerable good explanation on their site of how DNSSEC works. Its mostly oriented around preventing MITM but its not really a protocol oriented around privacy maximization.
My ISP could in theory MITM traffic to ns01.gannett-dns.com and record all traffic passing thru its MITM or send me to a completely different server (a competing newspaper, I suppose) and inserting/replacing fake data is "impossible"-ish with DNSSEC. However it does nothing for privacy.
Consider I could add a GPG signature to this post to prove the GPG key probably controlled by VLM signed this post, probably because I'm VLM or at least because someone posting this has access to my private key LOL. However anyone who wants can read this signed post, its hardly encrypted, merely authenticated via a signature.