Cloudflare CEO ponders legal methods of slowing down Ajit Pai's internet connection

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/23/seriously-fuck-that-guy-2.html

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Got to love a little bit of karmic justice.

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Didn’t they also relax the rules about what information ISPs can sell about their users?

What does Ajit Pai browse on the Internet? I’d buy that for a dollar!

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Yeah, I think that that’s the next step for you guys: The people who made these decisions need to have these rules turned upon them, that they can experience firsthand the damage they are causing.

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I think a good one to start with is buying up ISPs in Washington DC and start slowing down internet service for all the schools rich parents and legislators send their kids to.

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Iiiii dunno about this. I’d prefer it if no one spent any effort working on QoS fuckery, and instead spent their energy on more direct and effective forms of retribution against Pai. Such as:

  • help find evidence to actually indict him for his transparent corruption!
  • ensure every American knows who he is and what he’s done!
  • find out what leisure activities he spends his bribes on, and ruin them!
  • train birds to shit on his head every time he leaves a barber shop!

etc.

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Why not 300-bps:

I probably still have mine in my junk box.

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Gotta make it an acoustic coupling.

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Can’t say I blame him for that stance. Lack of neutrality at ISPs will absolutely gut the business model of CDNs, because regional caches can’t help traffic that’s deprioritized at the edge, making it less worth it for “outsider” services to use them, thus raising prices for “insider” services and making it more economical for all concerned for the ISP to implement its own in-house CDN for the benefit of its chosen winners.

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I know for a solid fact that Cox has done just that in the metro Phoenix, AZ area. They also do… interesting things to your DNS traffic if you don’t use their name servers as well, and they play around with SMTP traffic as well. (they run the biggest transparent SMTP proxy (NOT a relay!) that I’ve ever seen.)

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Legal or no, yes, please.

So, one guy has the power to arbitrarily throttle a particular citizen’s access just because he feels like it, he’s not bound by Title II, and you think this is an effective argument in favor of the status quo?

Cory, you so crazy.

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Are you explicitly assuring us he’ll loose that power once Bababooey gets those choppers into the internet? Or are you just implying it?

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I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a pretty horrifying thought.

I think the point is that as long as we have net neutrality, Cloudflare cannot do this (legally). But, once we lose net neutrality, all bets are off. Of course Cloudflare has the technology and capacity to do this to whomever they want, but we have laws in place (well, the US had laws) that should prevent these shenanigans.

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Matthew Prince really seems dead set on destroying any shred of credibility cloudflare had.

Given that the proposed change involves putting even more parties in the position to do this sort of thing(many of them with telco or TV interests that will make doing so a matter of obvious profit incentive rather than spite); I’m going with ‘yes’.

It isn’t an argument that the status quo is what we might want it to be; but that doesn’t prevent the proposed change from being markedly worse.

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No. My point is that the FCC’s decision to reclassify ISPs to fall under Title II, which is what people are calling “net neutrality,” didn’t include Cloudflare. And we’re told that if it is to be repealed, the Internet will fall into the horrible, awful pre-2014 Dark Ages when internet access cost $1000/month for a 14.4k dialup connection and you had to pay a surcharge for every different website you wanted to access.

But “net neutrality” doesn’t include Cloudflare; Cloudflare was not arbitrarily reclassified by the FCC under Title 2. And here’s the CEO of Cloudflare threatening to throttle a particular individual’s internet access just because the CEO of Cloudflare doesn’t like what he says. Hell, I remember when Cloudflare shut off the Daily Stormer, and Cory loved it.

There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy about it this. Pre-net neutrality got us an open internet that turned into the largest engine of commerce and expression the world has seen. Post-net neutrality got us massive and widespread censorship by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Cloudflare, to the extent that Twitter is now saying it will restrict your on-line account based on your off-line actions. Given what the internet is like today, compared with what it was like in 2014, I know which I’d rather have.

If you want to argue that Cloudflare should be reclassified as a common carrier, I’d agree with you along with the other, said, aforementioned companies. But the correct way to do that is by Congress passing a law, not an unelected bureaucracy that isn’t answerable to the voter arrogating to itself the power to do so. It’d be entertaining as hell of the FCC turned around to Matthew Pence and said “Oh, hey, your business is now under Title II, you can’t shut anyone off for reasons like that anymore.” I mean, it was okay for the previous FCC to do it, it’s okay for this one to do it, right?

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Sounds like you’ve trying to bring fact to a Moral Outrage.