ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.

gsa4555@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 786 points –
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
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I don't want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.

But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.

Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as "flash worms" or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it's causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.

And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn't speech; it's fully-automated malware activity.


¹ From Andy Warhol's aphorism that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm

Yeah ok, that's like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.

that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources

First question: how?

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