Without being glib, differing services from the same company may have differing AUP's. Transit and Access are very different businesses with different customer expectations.
In this case it is not at all glib. The author does not seem to have considered that his residential class service could have a differing AUP from any other class of service.
He mentions large providers being customers of Lumen and just lets the assumption that they fall under the same AUP be present.
I would expect differing AUP for Residential and Business connections. Both of which would be standardized.
Once you step up into the territory where you are more than a SOHO business customer, you get things like a meaningful SLA, guaranteed throughput, and other terms that can be negotiated.
His residential AUP literally does not apply once you start talking tens of thousands of dollars per month, and scaling way up from there.
It's perfectly legitimate for a company to apply more lenient conditions - or simply not enforce certain requirements - for some customers, especially bigger and more profitable ones. There is no duty to treat your customers equally (with specific narrow exceptions for discrimination of explicitly named protected groups for some types of contracts), you are free to enforce an AUP only for "the little guy" if you feel that's more profitable for you.
You are also free to simply deny service to someone just because; and as a more lenient way, you are free to warn someone that you will deny service if they will continue a certain activity, no matter if it was specified in some rules before or not. You likely would have to refund any prepayments and connection fees, however, there is no duty for you to continue dealing with an unwanted customer just because they are keeping within the letter of the rules you posted - doing business with someone or refusing to do so is a free choice.
You could make a good argument that ISPs should be treated like regulated utilities who would have to service everyone, and service everyone equally, because of the importance of internet access in modern society - however, this is not the situation right now in USA.
> You could make a good argument that ISPs should be treated like regulated utilities who would have to service everyone, and service everyone equally, because of the importance of internet access in modern society - however, this is not the situation right now in USA.
Any company calling itself an internet service provider that alters TCP sessions is no longer an internet service provider. It's more of a web service provider.
This is antagonism and fraud by the ISP, regardless of anything else. When Comcast was caught doing it in the early 2010s there was a huge uproar. I guess everyone using mobile now has dimmed expectations.
Does your declaration about modification extend to supplementing the DSCP values of SIP packets (when not set) with low-latency / high-importance tags to prioritize them over general backbone traffic?
Should ISPs be allowed to add prioritization to one particular VoIP protocol even when the end-user isn't tagging those packets, while leaving other competing VoIP protocols at a disadvantage?
They aren't altering his TCP sessions. The calix modem has built in ddos protection that his tor relay is triggering. Running a tor relay on a home connection is begging to be fired as a customer.
> If they wish to claim to be a service provider they can't exercise discretion in this way.
Why do you think so? AFAIK there are not any legal requirements for internet service providers to not exercise discretion; they are allowed offer internet service, call themselves a service provider and exercise discretion in this way.
This is not a case about common carrier protections, if there was one then perhaps this incident might be used as an argument that they should not apply, but it's debatable whether it would succeed, and in that (whether this discretion would affect their position in some future lawsuits) a legal risk that they can choose to take. They definitely are allowed to exercise some discretion, and as far as I see, the latest FCC rulings since 2017 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/14...) do not require internet service providers to be neutral at all.
CenturyLink is pretty antagonistic too. I had to go directly to the North American COO (who happened to live here in Atlanta where I live) to get them to finally finish a fiber deployment that was scheduled for 9 months, and wound up taking 21 months. $7k/month and a 5 year committment for the build out, they dragged their feet and gave me the runaround for nearly two years.
I have sympathy for the author's plight. But his proposed solution -- forcing CenturyLink to sell its networks to local government if they don't change their ways -- is one of the worst ideas I can imagine.
I'd love to see centurylink/lumen go bust, lose everything, and local governments take over their facilities. Every last employee forced to find other employment. Every last facility auctioned to another smaller regional provider.
Hatred is too weak a word for the feelings I have toward that hellish pit of misery and stupidity.
> I'd love to see centurylink/lumen go bust, lose everything, and local governments take over their facilities. Every last employee forced to find other employment. Every last facility auctioned to another smaller regional provider.
> Hatred is too weak a word for the feelings I have toward that hellish pit of misery and stupidity.
> They should not exist.
What? They provide good service, their tech staff are union, and they charge less than Comcast, who had a monopoly in my area for a decade. Could you provide any details to support your extreme emotional reactions to this company?
It really depends on what are of the country we are talking about. I know of areas where centurylink is absolutely horribly at it is like pulling teeth to get them to resolve issues on high cost business / government fiber connections.
Horrible service, massive bureacracy that makes improvements or accountability impossible, corruption at every level. I'm glad for you that you've been insulated from the bad, but it's so trivially visible to anyone who cares to look that it is clear that you are part of the problem. By not being aware of, or by your not having the ability to help fix problems you become aware of, you are participating in an abominable kafkaesque nightmare.
The amount of money shuffling between acquired isps and the main company is insane. The corporate / enterprise customer service is actively hostile. I've gone through multiple account managers in the last decade, across multiple jobs, who have lied through their teeth, disrupted service, ignored pleas for assistance, and made an absolute hell out of dealing with the company. Every person I've spoken to ranging over a half dozen states have reported similar batshit horrible experiences, across every product from local phone to voip to dark fiber to metro ethernet. The bills are deliberately crafted to be inscrutable and allow the company to arbitrarily overcharge. Early this year, my company was overcharged $12k in a month, when the regular charges are around $2k. This happened to over a dozen local and regional companies, some of whom wouldn't have known to challenge it.
In recent years I have had to go to public service agencies, looped in senators and congressmen to bring pressure to bear, escalated problems to c level executives, and it's left a horrible impression which seems universally held among my peers, all over the country. I even have friends working for the company, all planning their exit because it's such a shitshow internally. If any company deserves to be broken up, it is Lumen/CenturyLink.
They're probably responsible for me losing years of life expectancy, and my experience is far from unique.
Never had any problems with them. Cox, on the other hand, was a massive dumpster fire. CenturyLink has been great quality and service for Fiber. Whomever the author is has an axe to grind with CenturyLink. Also what the heck is the title?
I'm on fiber 1GB for $60/month with ATT - the idea of the govt running this - just does not compute. Service has been great BTW. I get next day service, a guy in the attic splicing the fiber.
If you are in the bay area and need gov services, we were months waiting to get a permit done and finaled for a TINY home alteration. Most govt agencies won't see you in person here still.
Municipal fiber sounds like the only solution to me. Let's stop pretending we can have a market economy when competition is nigh impossible, socialize it and be done with it.
The link here is just to a survey of Tor users, based on self-reporting. Pretty dubious methodology. Beyond that, even if only a minority of the traffic is malicious it's not with the trouble for the ISP.
Is this actually true? Most traffic I've seen on my own sites when I had them from tor WAS malicious.
Ie, it was a pretty easy call to block tor. Maybe the big sites like wikipedia / cloudflare etc have less trouble with tor abuse, but for small sites - very annoying to deal with tor users.
The isp shouldn't have any knowledge of, or care for the traffic being transmitted over their lines. Surveillance is an evil on its own.
In the case of Tor, it means the ISP actually cannot know what the traffic is, without nation state resources, so any preemptive exclusion of Tor traffic is a prejudicial judgement by the isp, or them being upset about not being able to spy on the customer.
That's fine to say until a customer paying <$100/month generates $10,000 in legal fees. For Tor exits, the traffic is unencrypted so the ISP will see it... and be held responsible.
If the isp doesn't snoop traffic or keep records, they're not liable. They can keep a generic reply with a fill in the blanks response signed off by their lawyer.
The author's problem is their access media. Get a [1g|10g|100g] [wave|dark fiber] to Lumen and all of those problems go away.
As for AUP violations, they have every right to complain if you are using THEIR IP's in a way they don't like. However, you would likely have to be a real and persistent problem to actually get cut off. If you use your own IP's/ASN like all the big networks listed in the article your risk of getting cut off for AUP violations is practically zero. You would have to be so notorious as to affect their reputation anyway.
This isn't specific to the DMCA. Common carrier protections are for all criminal liability.
It's basically a restatement of common sense -- if you don't know it was happening why should you be liable? But if you start acting like you are in control then a court gets to assume that you are in control.
Almost all residential ISPs block outbound SMTP to prevent their IP space from being used to send spam. Does that cause them to lose common carrier status?
Interpreting the law as written, yes.
I think the bigger issue is some will not re-enable it. Common carrier protections allow you to respond to abuse once you realize it exists and that such usage breaks the law. However you don't get to filter to enforce your chosen morality.
There are likely real hardware limits on consumer oriented Internet access gear. Some Googling suggests they may hardware accelerate NAT and I'm sure there are limits on the number of NAT entries that fit in the Broadcom memory.
ONTs have to be very cheap, think $100 or less, and there's a lot of functionality in there. If you need beyond consumer functions you may need to upgrade to business service or similar.
In a residential setting there could be capacity limitations/oversubscription that needs to be protected by "DDoS" mitigation at each customer edge. It could do dumb rate limiting which would affect youtube uploads etc., or it could look at flows and try to nuke "obvious" outbound DDoS attacks.
CenturyLink ONTs are set up to do the bare minimum. Think bridge mode. No NAT. There is a separate CPE router to terminate one end of the PPPoE connection and do NAT as required.
It was funded by government/military, so th govt should probably consider how to protect the investment from corporate antagonism. It’s intended to circumvent authoritarianist governments
Unpopular opinion, but I think it would be better to respect the author’s decision to retract their words from a very front-and-center experience with their colleagues’ colleagues.
I’ve made a few nutty comments myself, and it took years of training to break the habit of saying whatever comes to mind online. And I still fail occasionally. The delete button is a merciful respite when you come to your senses, and I empathize with the author’s desire to be forgotten.
That said, I can’t convince you to remove the link, and even if you did, I guess someone else would post it. I just can’t remember any time in HN history that this has happened (though I’m sure it has), and we might want to weigh accordingly whether it’s worth going against a community member’s wishes. After all, they are as much a member of this community as you or I.
EDIT: I admit, though, I read the article out of curiosity. It seems fine.
Maybe they retracted it because the top comment was calling out the author’s history in a very personal way. But whatever the reason, it’s still their decision.
I'll admit: I have a bad habit of whenever I'm angry just rant online.
I deleted the article since I didn't want to put any more bad press against CenturyLink or myself.
I could just lie that "I turned off my Tor relay" and do nothing.
About the other CenturyLink issue, it turned out it's an issue with the ONT, not the DoS protection, but a hard limit on the Broadcom Packet Flow Cache which is none of CL's issues. I'm buying another ONT off eBay to hope to fix it.
A word of advice: the key to breaking this habit is to force yourself to put the community’s interests above your own. That’s what worked for me.
For example, changing the title to a foreign language (in an effort to get the mods to wipe it off the front page?) only damages the community. HN needs to stay interesting to survive, and changing your title like that is both confusing and disappointing for the average HN user. (Normally, exotic titles that get upvoted to the front page turn out to be highly interesting.)
I say this not to criticize, but to help you long-term. Firstly, relax. None of this is going to matter to you in a month. Secondly, focus on writing substantive content “from the heart.” Try to write out of curiosity, and make sure that any time you write out of anger, alarm bells are going off in your head. “Warning: this isn’t intellectual curiosity that I’m feeling.”
Another solution in a case like this is to email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com and ask them to do whatever you wanted to do. I haven’t emailed in years, but when Scott was around, the return time on emails was sometimes less than one minute. (It was astonishing.) I urge you to try emailing, partly as a sign of good faith. As it stands now, it would be risky to let future articles from your domain sit on the front page, unless everyone understands this was a unique one-off situation.
You clearly have a lot to offer, and I hope to see you around long-term. Best of luck. And remember: no stress, friend.
I did this deliberately mainly so it doesn't get a lot of attention.
I wrote this article when I was angry, but later felt sorry for it so that's why I renamed it to a mix of Chinese and Japanese, so the algorithms move it down.
> I did this deliberately mainly so it doesn't get a lot of attention. ... I renamed it to a mix of Chinese and Japanese, so the algorithms move it down.
That isn't how the algorithms work for front page. Naming it something like this that does show up on the front page only attracts more attention to it as people go "WTF is that?!" as it is unusual and then go and click on it.
Centurylink is not a fast moving, nimble organization where most employees are team players. They are a legacy telecom provider that is an amalgamation of decades old systems held together with baling wire and the halfhearted effort of many employees, rocking the boat can backfire on you badly with them.
If your willing to put up with the process (gears turn slowly in Lumen/Centurylink land) issues like this can get resolved, but if you want more responsive service at comically low prices your going to need to move to Ziply territory north of Seattle.
Anyone else seeing the title change around? Currently it's
"、メール、ショ浏览地图、搜索地点、看实时路况，您的出行指にする「課題查询公交驾车线路、查", but it was "---Article Deleted---" and originally it was something actually like the archived version's title.
59 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadHe mentions large providers being customers of Lumen and just lets the assumption that they fall under the same AUP be present.
I would expect differing AUP for Residential and Business connections. Both of which would be standardized.
Once you step up into the territory where you are more than a SOHO business customer, you get things like a meaningful SLA, guaranteed throughput, and other terms that can be negotiated.
His residential AUP literally does not apply once you start talking tens of thousands of dollars per month, and scaling way up from there.
Is this a joke?
"Amazon, Microsoft, hosting companies like OVH and Digital Ocean, and universities like MIT"
The combined spend of that group is multiples of what he is spending on his residential service.
You are also free to simply deny service to someone just because; and as a more lenient way, you are free to warn someone that you will deny service if they will continue a certain activity, no matter if it was specified in some rules before or not. You likely would have to refund any prepayments and connection fees, however, there is no duty for you to continue dealing with an unwanted customer just because they are keeping within the letter of the rules you posted - doing business with someone or refusing to do so is a free choice.
You could make a good argument that ISPs should be treated like regulated utilities who would have to service everyone, and service everyone equally, because of the importance of internet access in modern society - however, this is not the situation right now in USA.
Yeah, it absolutely should be.
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2021-November/2163...
I would not be surprised if this were more an attempt to drop him as a customer, than a hostile act towards all Tor users.
This is antagonism and fraud by the ISP, regardless of anything else. When Comcast was caught doing it in the early 2010s there was a huge uproar. I guess everyone using mobile now has dimmed expectations.
Why do you think so? AFAIK there are not any legal requirements for internet service providers to not exercise discretion; they are allowed offer internet service, call themselves a service provider and exercise discretion in this way.
This is not a case about common carrier protections, if there was one then perhaps this incident might be used as an argument that they should not apply, but it's debatable whether it would succeed, and in that (whether this discretion would affect their position in some future lawsuits) a legal risk that they can choose to take. They definitely are allowed to exercise some discretion, and as far as I see, the latest FCC rulings since 2017 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/14...) do not require internet service providers to be neutral at all.
Hatred is too weak a word for the feelings I have toward that hellish pit of misery and stupidity.
They should not exist.
> Hatred is too weak a word for the feelings I have toward that hellish pit of misery and stupidity.
> They should not exist.
What? They provide good service, their tech staff are union, and they charge less than Comcast, who had a monopoly in my area for a decade. Could you provide any details to support your extreme emotional reactions to this company?
The amount of money shuffling between acquired isps and the main company is insane. The corporate / enterprise customer service is actively hostile. I've gone through multiple account managers in the last decade, across multiple jobs, who have lied through their teeth, disrupted service, ignored pleas for assistance, and made an absolute hell out of dealing with the company. Every person I've spoken to ranging over a half dozen states have reported similar batshit horrible experiences, across every product from local phone to voip to dark fiber to metro ethernet. The bills are deliberately crafted to be inscrutable and allow the company to arbitrarily overcharge. Early this year, my company was overcharged $12k in a month, when the regular charges are around $2k. This happened to over a dozen local and regional companies, some of whom wouldn't have known to challenge it.
In recent years I have had to go to public service agencies, looped in senators and congressmen to bring pressure to bear, escalated problems to c level executives, and it's left a horrible impression which seems universally held among my peers, all over the country. I even have friends working for the company, all planning their exit because it's such a shitshow internally. If any company deserves to be broken up, it is Lumen/CenturyLink.
They're probably responsible for me losing years of life expectancy, and my experience is far from unique.
If you are in the bay area and need gov services, we were months waiting to get a permit done and finaled for a TINY home alteration. Most govt agencies won't see you in person here still.
The link here is just to a survey of Tor users, based on self-reporting. Pretty dubious methodology. Beyond that, even if only a minority of the traffic is malicious it's not with the trouble for the ISP.
Ie, it was a pretty easy call to block tor. Maybe the big sites like wikipedia / cloudflare etc have less trouble with tor abuse, but for small sites - very annoying to deal with tor users.
In the case of Tor, it means the ISP actually cannot know what the traffic is, without nation state resources, so any preemptive exclusion of Tor traffic is a prejudicial judgement by the isp, or them being upset about not being able to spy on the customer.
As for AUP violations, they have every right to complain if you are using THEIR IP's in a way they don't like. However, you would likely have to be a real and persistent problem to actually get cut off. If you use your own IP's/ASN like all the big networks listed in the article your risk of getting cut off for AUP violations is practically zero. You would have to be so notorious as to affect their reputation anyway.
DMCA notices typically go to the owner of the IP addresses and ISP's have wide latitude on how they enforce their AUP.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/chapter-5/subchap...
[1] https://archive.fo/dAj0T
I’ve made a few nutty comments myself, and it took years of training to break the habit of saying whatever comes to mind online. And I still fail occasionally. The delete button is a merciful respite when you come to your senses, and I empathize with the author’s desire to be forgotten.
That said, I can’t convince you to remove the link, and even if you did, I guess someone else would post it. I just can’t remember any time in HN history that this has happened (though I’m sure it has), and we might want to weigh accordingly whether it’s worth going against a community member’s wishes. After all, they are as much a member of this community as you or I.
EDIT: I admit, though, I read the article out of curiosity. It seems fine.
Maybe they retracted it because the top comment was calling out the author’s history in a very personal way. But whatever the reason, it’s still their decision.
I'll admit: I have a bad habit of whenever I'm angry just rant online.
I deleted the article since I didn't want to put any more bad press against CenturyLink or myself.
I could just lie that "I turned off my Tor relay" and do nothing.
About the other CenturyLink issue, it turned out it's an issue with the ONT, not the DoS protection, but a hard limit on the Broadcom Packet Flow Cache which is none of CL's issues. I'm buying another ONT off eBay to hope to fix it.
For example, changing the title to a foreign language (in an effort to get the mods to wipe it off the front page?) only damages the community. HN needs to stay interesting to survive, and changing your title like that is both confusing and disappointing for the average HN user. (Normally, exotic titles that get upvoted to the front page turn out to be highly interesting.)
I say this not to criticize, but to help you long-term. Firstly, relax. None of this is going to matter to you in a month. Secondly, focus on writing substantive content “from the heart.” Try to write out of curiosity, and make sure that any time you write out of anger, alarm bells are going off in your head. “Warning: this isn’t intellectual curiosity that I’m feeling.”
Another solution in a case like this is to email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com and ask them to do whatever you wanted to do. I haven’t emailed in years, but when Scott was around, the return time on emails was sometimes less than one minute. (It was astonishing.) I urge you to try emailing, partly as a sign of good faith. As it stands now, it would be risky to let future articles from your domain sit on the front page, unless everyone understands this was a unique one-off situation.
You clearly have a lot to offer, and I hope to see you around long-term. Best of luck. And remember: no stress, friend.
I flagged the submission since that seems to be the only real way to do this.
https://news-ycombinator-com.translate.goog/item?id=29719839...
I wrote this article when I was angry, but later felt sorry for it so that's why I renamed it to a mix of Chinese and Japanese, so the algorithms move it down.
I don't speak Chinese or Japanese.
That isn't how the algorithms work for front page. Naming it something like this that does show up on the front page only attracts more attention to it as people go "WTF is that?!" as it is unusual and then go and click on it.
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33265819-Qwest-I-get-laten...
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33246909-Qwest-Website-Cen...
Centurylink is not a fast moving, nimble organization where most employees are team players. They are a legacy telecom provider that is an amalgamation of decades old systems held together with baling wire and the halfhearted effort of many employees, rocking the boat can backfire on you badly with them.
If your willing to put up with the process (gears turn slowly in Lumen/Centurylink land) issues like this can get resolved, but if you want more responsive service at comically low prices your going to need to move to Ziply territory north of Seattle.