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kmhappel

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  • Mar 27th, 2010 @ 11:53pm

    Cox Censorship

    Actually I was invited to testify and participate in the virtual hearings on net neutrality. Your comment,
    “I find it amusing that you would be complaining about what the company is allowing you to do on "their" network. Many people on the political "right" claim that companies can do whatever they want whenever they want. Customers have no rights. If you are a disgruntled consumer, too bad. Don't use Cox.”
    First a factual point, I am not using “their network” anymore than a given DSL service is using “its” network. There are two distinctly different functions, one is physical access and the second is content access. But you must know this. The second is that your statement, “Many people on the political "right" claim that companies can do whatever they want whenever they want” is a ridiculous assertion. It is too bad that you miss the point entirely.

    The issue of net neutrality is about the fact that net access is provided through an ISP’s bandwidth tunnel into one of the NAPs (Network Access Points) and that ISPs have been placing various types of restraint upon that bandwidth. All types of regulation have dangers with respect to access freedom and content control.

    One view of regulation is that any kind of constraint on edge access to a NAP is illegal. Having no edge restriction will mean that content providers will have to provide content based access restriction instead of ISPs and edge networks. Some feel that no limitations would lead, in time, to content access based upon content provider memberships where control of content access is closest to a direct user-provider relationship and is open DNS access adverse. This idea is opposed by those fear an end to net anonymity and giving each provider and user a hard and legally binding ID. One consequence would be an end to the commercial marketing model currently used by the pornography industry

    Another idea about regulation is to regulate a common set of access restraint and then build content filters into the edge networks for enforcement. The problem with a common set of access restraint regulations is that each and every issue based concept can ultimately place new restrictions in the mix.

    Imagine the types of content constraint that could be added by religious movements or by enforcement agencies when the current net neutral concept is replaced and very different regulatory concept is imposed upon access. The Chinese, for example, use such a regulatory model. Google now wants to back out after they had agreed to that access restraint and are finding it not as easy as they thought.

    Actually the need is not for net neutrality but for edge network access freedom. No regulatory body is empowered with the kind of infrastructure and tools that would be required to detect, validate and prosecute such a strategy except the national intelligence agencies. Not your first choice either I would guess, based upon your comments.
  • Mar 27th, 2010 @ 11:12am

    Cox Censorship

    I am the coordinator of a tea party group in Vista, CA. Today I was notified that I will not be allowed to send emails to the members of the tea party group that had given me their emails addresses specificly for the purpose of receiving the emails. The reason: they are considered spam by cox.

    I think a class action lawsuit is the only option in such cases. In this case I want that outgoing message filter made illegal. HOw else can I stop this. We discovered that a neighboring tea party has been bblocked for six months and was never notified (see the blog post here about Cox doing that to people)

    Do you have an alternative? I don't care about the money, but inhtis case they are setting precident for censorship by autonomous software review of content and outgoing mail patterns of an individual user to individual users without invalid addresses and with their permission.The comapny said they could do nothing about it and that I should send them one at a time.

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