You're right, as a leaf network I'd primarily be receiving traffic for my network and not carrying transit traffic. That means I'd be paying for bandwidth, but I'd be factoring that in to my budgets. I have a choice of multiple backbone providers at any given exchange, so if one provider wants to mess with me I just go talk to one of the others. All the major telcos are backbone providers as far as I know, but there's plenty of large backbone providers who aren't telcos and who make their money providing transit between exchanges. If one telco doesn't want to take my money to handle my traffic, one of the other providers will (as long as I accept that I'm not a backbone network and won't be able to "pay" for my bandwidth by carrying traffic for them in return).
Not over his fiber. If I were building an ISP, say, I'd be getting upstream connectivity from SIX or PAIX-SEA. AT&T probably also peers at those exchanges since they're a big backbone provider, but their contract is with the exchange and interfering with traffic from another of the exchange's customers would almost certainly be a breach of that contract. SIX and PAIX-SEA probably wouldn't de-peer AT&T over that, but they'd likely make it costly for AT&T to keep it up. At worst I'd simply request that my traffic be routed to the other backbone providers that peer there and go back to ignoring AT&T.
Oh, one thing the exchange could do: since AT&T probably co-locates their connection from their backbone to their local ISP infrastructure at the exchange (since they have to have equipment there anyway to connect their backbone network to the exchange), the exchange could terminate the co-location leaving AT&T to figure out how they're going to connect their own local network to their backbone (finding or building a data center to hold the equipment and running fiber to extend their backbone and local physical plant to the new data center). AT&T might pull their backbone peering over that, but SIX/PAIX-SEA are big enough and connect to enough backbone providers that that'd hurt AT&T more than them.
Not really. In this case, if you read the article, he ran his own infrastructure (fiber-optic cable) so he's not leasing it from anyone. His upstream connection would be with a backbone provider at an Internet Exchange, bypassing the local ISPs entirely (who probably also lease capacity on the backbone at the IX instead of building their own national-level hardware infrastructure).
With Section 230 still in place - what is the legal basis for a hoster shutting down a service purely because of public sentiment?
Freedom of association. Citizen's United held that corporations are legally people, so they have the same right to decide who their customers are that you have to decide who you associate with. If AWS decides it doesn't want to associate with Parler, they've got that right under the US Constitution same as you do. That's on top of their general right to enforce their ToS and kick people off for violating it.
I've always said that the conservatives would regret pushing for certain legal decisions once those decisions started to get used against them.
Unfortunately, you're confused on how the DNS hierarchy works. The root DNS servers don't list any second-level domains at all. They only resolve top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .eu and so on. the root domain is controlled by ICANN and the servers for it are run by various companies under contract to ICANN. Each TLD then has a registry and a registry operator that runs it. The .com registry lists all the second-level domains (2LDs) under .com. For .com, the registry operator is Verisign, who run the DNS servers for .com.
And the .com DNS servers don't even host any DNS records for the 2LDs. They only host NS records (that name the DNS servers for a given 2LD) and the corresponding A/AAAA records which provide the IP addresses for the hosts listed in the NS records. Each domain owner then selects their own DNS provider who handles the actual domain's DNS records, and puts the nameserver names that provider's given them into the registration for the domain (which then propagates to the registry operator's servers).
So, if you're talking about hosting anything in DNS, you'd be talking about the domain's DNS provider, not the root nameservers or the TLD registries. Also note that the domain registration and the DNS provider aren't strictly tied together either. It's the usual case that your DNS provider is also the registrar you go through to register your domain, but it's entirely legal and possible for you to register your domain through say GoDaddy but use AWS Route 53 as your DNS provider. Also, you aren't limited to just one DNS provider per domain, it's common to use multiple DNS providers so that an outage at one of them doesn't kill resolution of your domain.
If they'd acted then, he'd still have been pedding racist conspiracy theories to his base and they'd be believing them and acting on them. Plus he'd've had more reasons they'd believe to claim he was on to something because look how the Deep State's trying to shut him up. We'd've still ended up here, just that we really wouldn't've seen it coming because we wouldn't've seen it until it erupted.
Only if the Democrats go along with it. As Schumer's already shown, there's a procedural method to force a floor vote in the Senate over the Majority Leader's objection. The Democrats merely need to be willing to use it regularly enough on things they can successfully pass (at worst they only need to swing a couple of GOP Senators to succeed) to break McConnell's illusion of control.
And even the Majority Leader's control of the agenda isn't part of the Senate rules. By the rules the Vice President as presiding officer controls the agenda and which items go to a floor vote when, it's only tradition that that gets delegated to the Majority Leader and tradition can't be enforced.
The problem you have is that in Pennsylvania the votes in question are already segregated from the rest and haven't been included in the reported counts. So if Trump wins his case there and gets those ballots thrown out, the results remain unchanged and Biden is the winner.
I'd love to have political power in a jurisdiction to be able to respond "Police policy is that BWCs must always be worn and active while on duty. To the extent that Federal officers will not permit this policy to be complied with, the police department will unfortunately be unable to cooperate with them or accompany them in their activities.".
<p>Basically, if you have a problem with Section 230 you don't want free speech. What you want is to either force someone else to let you use their soapbox free of charge or you want to take away someone else's soapbox.</p>
No, prior to Section 230 web sites were liable for content if they did any sort of moderation. They could only escape liability if they didn't moderate at all. If the law were changed to remove the second one, making web sites liable for user-posted content even if they didn't moderate at all, a total shutdown would be the only viable option.
It's amusing that one of the major drivers behind Section 230 was Republican complaints about material they objected to being posted and web sites refusing to implement any sort of moderation policies on the grounds they couldn't afford the liability that came with moderation. The Republicans were all for Section 230 because it would allow web sites to block pro-choice, anti-gay and other content the Republicans found objectionable without running afoul of the law as set in Cubby v. Compuserve and Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy.
Why am I prohibited from being biased in what I will and won't put up with in my home? And yes, that's the correct pronoun. Facebook deciding what they will and won't carry as far as content is exactly identical to my deciding what signs I will and won't allow to be put up in my front yard. Even if they're political campaign signs. I don't get to dictate to my neighbors, or control what goes up on city property, but if I decide I want to allow signs for Democratic candidates and refuse signs for Republican candidates why should I be prohibited from doing that?
And don't give me that Facebook is a social media platform and I'm not. My yard and Facebook are both displaying content to the public, the only difference is the size and that's not relevant to the issue.
Second, this aspect of the safe harbor, which can be read to require the replacement of content following a counternotice has some other problems in that it can be read as forcing a company to host content. And, a website should have the freedom to not host any content it doesn't wish to host, even if that content is not infringing.
The website already decided to host the content, though, or it wouldn't've been present to be taken down. So forcing it's restoration isn't forcing the website to host any content it hadn't already decided it would host. The problem is that 512(g) only immunizes the host from legal claims, so there's no solid basis for arguing that they can't change their minds about hosting the content just because of a takedown request. It still leaves users at the mercy of large organizations pulling a "Nice operation you have there. Sure be a pity if something happened to it, like us running you into the ground with baseless lawsuits you can't afford to defend against unless you do what we want.".
After SCO v. IBM, I wouldn't be at all surprised at anything anyone might sue over and what lengths they might go to to try and avoid admitting they'd lost. The only problem the Trumps might have is that they haven't managed to finagle the sweetheart deal SCO got from their lawyers so they might balk at having to pay their own legal fees as they go.
Which has been up and running for a year now. The big question now is exclusive titles. Do you think Google lacks the money to pay a studio enough to make making a major must-have title exclusive to Stadia?
How does it have a monopoly on online ads? The majority of online ads are placed directly on web sites, and there I see primarily non-Google ad networks showing the ads. And how would Google use search to support controlling which ad networks web sites use for their own ads, anyway? It's not like they refuse to list web sites in their search results based on which ad networks they use. I'd be more concerned about their web analytics tools myself. Google's main focus isn't search or advertising, it's user behavior data and web analytics tools are the most comprehensive way of collecting user behavior data without users even realizing it's being collected.
TBH I think the real problem's that Google's reached the point where it's got so much money and so many resources that if it wanted to open a restaurant chain it could guarantee success simply by buying up such a large portion of critical supplies (napkins, basic foodstuffs like tomato sauce or ground beef or soy sauce) that other restaurant chains simply couldn't afford to stay in business.
Something to note: without competitors, there is no competition. The question shouldn't be whether antitrust law should protect competitors, but rather what it should protect them from. It shouldn't protect them from their own poor decisions, but it should protect them from the malicious actions of a dominant player aimed at keeping them from ever becoming large enough to become a threat.
Except that Google is tying use of it's Android services to use of it's version of Android, and they're nowhere near a monopoly in phone operating systems. Apple uses it's own phone OS, and lots of Chinese phone makers are offering phones using their own forks of Android without Google services. Without a monopoly, Section 2 doesn't come into play.
Trying to bring in search runs into the problem that Google doesn't tie use of their search engine to anything. You don't need to use Google's official Android as the phone OS to make Google the default search engine for your phones, witness Apple. Alleging tying is going to be a hard sell when you can't identify what Google's supposed to be tying to use of their search engine.
I believe they still do, but I don't think that'll be usable by the DOJ. Microsoft for decades had the same kind of terms in their OEM contracts: if you sold any computers with any OS other than Windows on them you were barred from getting an OEM license for Windows and had to buy and install individual retail copies of Windows if you wanted to offer Windows. The DOJ could never get an antitrust argument based on that to stick in court. I suspect the same arrangements come up in a lot of areas, eg. car dealerships, where if you want to be an authorized dealer for a brand you can't sell competing brands. Those arrangements have never resulted in any legal problems, so I don't think the DOJ can use that argument here. Especially since their argument is that Google is a monopoly in search, not phone operating systems, and there's no coherent argument that Google is using their search engine to force phone makers to use Android. If the DOJ tries, all Google has to do is utter one word: "Apple.".
Unfortunately for you, no. The President only has the power to arbitrarily hire and fire appointed officials. Other than a few people at the top, the DOJ is staffed by hired staff who are not appointed (thus not subject to the President's authority to replace) but are subject to USC Title 5 per Congress's authority under Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution.
This was done expressly to prevent the President from arbitrarily firing all employees of a department and replacing them with his own people, after severe abuses of the spoils system.
On the post: Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You're right, as a leaf network I'd primarily be receiving traffic for my network and not carrying transit traffic. That means I'd be paying for bandwidth, but I'd be factoring that in to my budgets. I have a choice of multiple backbone providers at any given exchange, so if one provider wants to mess with me I just go talk to one of the others. All the major telcos are backbone providers as far as I know, but there's plenty of large backbone providers who aren't telcos and who make their money providing transit between exchanges. If one telco doesn't want to take my money to handle my traffic, one of the other providers will (as long as I accept that I'm not a backbone network and won't be able to "pay" for my bandwidth by carrying traffic for them in return).
On the post: Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not over his fiber. If I were building an ISP, say, I'd be getting upstream connectivity from SIX or PAIX-SEA. AT&T probably also peers at those exchanges since they're a big backbone provider, but their contract is with the exchange and interfering with traffic from another of the exchange's customers would almost certainly be a breach of that contract. SIX and PAIX-SEA probably wouldn't de-peer AT&T over that, but they'd likely make it costly for AT&T to keep it up. At worst I'd simply request that my traffic be routed to the other backbone providers that peer there and go back to ignoring AT&T.
Oh, one thing the exchange could do: since AT&T probably co-locates their connection from their backbone to their local ISP infrastructure at the exchange (since they have to have equipment there anyway to connect their backbone network to the exchange), the exchange could terminate the co-location leaving AT&T to figure out how they're going to connect their own local network to their backbone (finding or building a data center to hold the equipment and running fiber to extend their backbone and local physical plant to the new data center). AT&T might pull their backbone peering over that, but SIX/PAIX-SEA are big enough and connect to enough backbone providers that that'd hurt AT&T more than them.
On the post: Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs
Re:
Not really. In this case, if you read the article, he ran his own infrastructure (fiber-optic cable) so he's not leasing it from anyone. His upstream connection would be with a backbone provider at an Internet Exchange, bypassing the local ISPs entirely (who probably also lease capacity on the backbone at the IX instead of building their own national-level hardware infrastructure).
On the post: Judge Not Impressed By Parler's Attempt To Force Amazon To Put It Back Online
Re: Isn't everybody missing the point here?
Freedom of association. Citizen's United held that corporations are legally people, so they have the same right to decide who their customers are that you have to decide who you associate with. If AWS decides it doesn't want to associate with Parler, they've got that right under the US Constitution same as you do. That's on top of their general right to enforce their ToS and kick people off for violating it.
I've always said that the conservatives would regret pushing for certain legal decisions once those decisions started to get used against them.
On the post: The Slope Gets More Slippery As You Expect Content Moderation To Happen At The Infrastructure Layer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Unfortunately, you're confused on how the DNS hierarchy works. The root DNS servers don't list any second-level domains at all. They only resolve top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .eu and so on. the root domain is controlled by ICANN and the servers for it are run by various companies under contract to ICANN. Each TLD then has a registry and a registry operator that runs it. The .com registry lists all the second-level domains (2LDs) under .com. For .com, the registry operator is Verisign, who run the DNS servers for .com.
And the .com DNS servers don't even host any DNS records for the 2LDs. They only host NS records (that name the DNS servers for a given 2LD) and the corresponding A/AAAA records which provide the IP addresses for the hosts listed in the NS records. Each domain owner then selects their own DNS provider who handles the actual domain's DNS records, and puts the nameserver names that provider's given them into the registration for the domain (which then propagates to the registry operator's servers).
So, if you're talking about hosting anything in DNS, you'd be talking about the domain's DNS provider, not the root nameservers or the TLD registries. Also note that the domain registration and the DNS provider aren't strictly tied together either. It's the usual case that your DNS provider is also the registrar you go through to register your domain, but it's entirely legal and possible for you to register your domain through say GoDaddy but use AWS Route 53 as your DNS provider. Also, you aren't limited to just one DNS provider per domain, it's common to use multiple DNS providers so that an outage at one of them doesn't kill resolution of your domain.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
If they'd acted then, he'd still have been pedding racist conspiracy theories to his base and they'd be believing them and acting on them. Plus he'd've had more reasons they'd believe to claim he was on to something because look how the Deep State's trying to shut him up. We'd've still ended up here, just that we really wouldn't've seen it coming because we wouldn't've seen it until it erupted.
On the post: GOP Confirms Unqualified Simington to FCC With Eye On Crippling Biden FCC
Re: Re:
Only if the Democrats go along with it. As Schumer's already shown, there's a procedural method to force a floor vote in the Senate over the Majority Leader's objection. The Democrats merely need to be willing to use it regularly enough on things they can successfully pass (at worst they only need to swing a couple of GOP Senators to succeed) to break McConnell's illusion of control.
And even the Majority Leader's control of the agenda isn't part of the Senate rules. By the rules the Vice President as presiding officer controls the agenda and which items go to a floor vote when, it's only tradition that that gets delegated to the Majority Leader and tradition can't be enforced.
On the post: Trump Campaign Gets Laughed Out Of Court For Claiming A Bunch Of Unvetted Webform Submissions Is 'Evidence' Of Voter Fraud
Re: Re:
The problem you have is that in Pennsylvania the votes in question are already segregated from the rest and haven't been included in the reported counts. So if Trump wins his case there and gets those ballots thrown out, the results remain unchanged and Biden is the winner.
On the post: The DOJ Will Finally Allow Local Cops To Wear Body Cameras When Working With Federal Agencies
I'd love to have political power in a jurisdiction to be able to respond "Police policy is that BWCs must always be worn and active while on duty. To the extent that Federal officers will not permit this policy to be complied with, the police department will unfortunately be unable to cooperate with them or accompany them in their activities.".
On the post: Your Problem Is Not With Section 230, But The 1st Amendment
<p>Basically, if you have a problem with Section 230 you don't want free speech. What you want is to either force someone else to let you use their soapbox free of charge or you want to take away someone else's soapbox.</p>
On the post: Changing Section 230 Won't Fix Politicians' Issues With Section 230
Re: Re:
No, prior to Section 230 web sites were liable for content if they did any sort of moderation. They could only escape liability if they didn't moderate at all. If the law were changed to remove the second one, making web sites liable for user-posted content even if they didn't moderate at all, a total shutdown would be the only viable option.
It's amusing that one of the major drivers behind Section 230 was Republican complaints about material they objected to being posted and web sites refusing to implement any sort of moderation policies on the grounds they couldn't afford the liability that came with moderation. The Republicans were all for Section 230 because it would allow web sites to block pro-choice, anti-gay and other content the Republicans found objectionable without running afoul of the law as set in Cubby v. Compuserve and Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy.
On the post: Transparency Is Important; Mandated Transparency Is Dangerous And Will Stifle Innovation And Competition
Re: Path to Litigation
Why am I prohibited from being biased in what I will and won't put up with in my home? And yes, that's the correct pronoun. Facebook deciding what they will and won't carry as far as content is exactly identical to my deciding what signs I will and won't allow to be put up in my front yard. Even if they're political campaign signs. I don't get to dictate to my neighbors, or control what goes up on city property, but if I decide I want to allow signs for Democratic candidates and refuse signs for Republican candidates why should I be prohibited from doing that?
And don't give me that Facebook is a social media platform and I'm not. My yard and Facebook are both displaying content to the public, the only difference is the size and that's not relevant to the issue.
On the post: Twitch's Freak Out Response To RIAA Takedown Demands Raises Even More DMCA Questions
The website already decided to host the content, though, or it wouldn't've been present to be taken down. So forcing it's restoration isn't forcing the website to host any content it hadn't already decided it would host. The problem is that 512(g) only immunizes the host from legal claims, so there's no solid basis for arguing that they can't change their minds about hosting the content just because of a takedown request. It still leaves users at the mercy of large organizations pulling a "Nice operation you have there. Sure be a pity if something happened to it, like us running you into the ground with baseless lawsuits you can't afford to defend against unless you do what we want.".
On the post: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner Threaten Defamation Suit Over Lincoln Project's Non-Defamatory Billboards
After SCO v. IBM, I wouldn't be at all surprised at anything anyone might sue over and what lengths they might go to to try and avoid admitting they'd lost. The only problem the Trumps might have is that they haven't managed to finagle the sweetheart deal SCO got from their lawyers so they might balk at having to pay their own legal fees as they go.
On the post: Should Antitrust Protect Competitors Or Competition?
Re: Re: Re: Blinkered by accident or intent?
Which has been up and running for a year now. The big question now is exclusive titles. Do you think Google lacks the money to pay a studio enough to make making a major must-have title exclusive to Stadia?
On the post: Should Antitrust Protect Competitors Or Competition?
Re: Blinkered by accident or intent?
How does it have a monopoly on online ads? The majority of online ads are placed directly on web sites, and there I see primarily non-Google ad networks showing the ads. And how would Google use search to support controlling which ad networks web sites use for their own ads, anyway? It's not like they refuse to list web sites in their search results based on which ad networks they use. I'd be more concerned about their web analytics tools myself. Google's main focus isn't search or advertising, it's user behavior data and web analytics tools are the most comprehensive way of collecting user behavior data without users even realizing it's being collected.
TBH I think the real problem's that Google's reached the point where it's got so much money and so many resources that if it wanted to open a restaurant chain it could guarantee success simply by buying up such a large portion of critical supplies (napkins, basic foodstuffs like tomato sauce or ground beef or soy sauce) that other restaurant chains simply couldn't afford to stay in business.
On the post: Should Antitrust Protect Competitors Or Competition?
Something to note: without competitors, there is no competition. The question shouldn't be whether antitrust law should protect competitors, but rather what it should protect them from. It shouldn't protect them from their own poor decisions, but it should protect them from the malicious actions of a dominant player aimed at keeping them from ever becoming large enough to become a threat.
On the post: Supporters Of Using Antitrust Against Big Tech Should Be Very Disappointed In How Weak The DOJ's Case Is
Re: Re:
Except that Google is tying use of it's Android services to use of it's version of Android, and they're nowhere near a monopoly in phone operating systems. Apple uses it's own phone OS, and lots of Chinese phone makers are offering phones using their own forks of Android without Google services. Without a monopoly, Section 2 doesn't come into play.
Trying to bring in search runs into the problem that Google doesn't tie use of their search engine to anything. You don't need to use Google's official Android as the phone OS to make Google the default search engine for your phones, witness Apple. Alleging tying is going to be a hard sell when you can't identify what Google's supposed to be tying to use of their search engine.
On the post: Supporters Of Using Antitrust Against Big Tech Should Be Very Disappointed In How Weak The DOJ's Case Is
Re: Re: Re:
I believe they still do, but I don't think that'll be usable by the DOJ. Microsoft for decades had the same kind of terms in their OEM contracts: if you sold any computers with any OS other than Windows on them you were barred from getting an OEM license for Windows and had to buy and install individual retail copies of Windows if you wanted to offer Windows. The DOJ could never get an antitrust argument based on that to stick in court. I suspect the same arrangements come up in a lot of areas, eg. car dealerships, where if you want to be an authorized dealer for a brand you can't sell competing brands. Those arrangements have never resulted in any legal problems, so I don't think the DOJ can use that argument here. Especially since their argument is that Google is a monopoly in search, not phone operating systems, and there's no coherent argument that Google is using their search engine to force phone makers to use Android. If the DOJ tries, all Google has to do is utter one word: "Apple.".
On the post: DOJ Says Trump's Tweets Declassifying All Russia Investigation Docs Doesn't Mean Anything; Judge Says They Better Go Ask Him
Re: Re: Re: who's the Boss
Unfortunately for you, no. The President only has the power to arbitrarily hire and fire appointed officials. Other than a few people at the top, the DOJ is staffed by hired staff who are not appointed (thus not subject to the President's authority to replace) but are subject to USC Title 5 per Congress's authority under Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution.
This was done expressly to prevent the President from arbitrarily firing all employees of a department and replacing them with his own people, after severe abuses of the spoils system.
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