To the FCC

On the proposal to withdraw the rules known as Network Neutrality

Gentlemen, I have seen much, for the matter is of direct personal
and professional interest to me and to most others of my profession.
I recall what the days were before the rules for Network Neutrality
were put in and the consequences thereof.

In the days before, bittorrent was the most popular traffic, and
the ISPs were not particularly happy about it as they had built
their networks to function like television lines rather than true
equal footing peers. In those days, they actively interfered with
bittorrent to slow it down and free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Now we know that most bittorrent traffic from that era was illicit
in some form or another, but the ISPs could not tell which traffic
was illicit and did not try to interfere only with such traffic.
In fact they did not reliably detect bittorrent but rather disrupted
any encrypted traffic that didn't have well-known VPN headers.

The mechanism they used was forging messages so that each side
saw nonsense messages the other didn't send. This is blatently
illegal but they depended on people not catching this. But I had
to debug faulting medical records software, and I noticed. I watched
both ends and saw messages received that were not sent. There is no
excuse for that one.

Yet if they interfere only by dropping packets they can still do
disproportionate harm. Had the proposals been normal QoS where
specific tunnels are allocated specific chunks of the bandwidth
with full agreement of both ends of the bottleneck there would
be no case. But behold, what the ISPs want to do is decide whose
traffic should get through and whose won't in such a way that
results in favoring one customer over another customer depending
on who the customer at the other end is. This is an abomination.

Gentlemen, enough of the network neutrality rules must remain
in place so that ISPs may not discrimate based on who their
customers are communicating with or what network protocol they
use.* If a particular customer wants to use QoS to dedicate
part of their own bandwidth for a particular service, let them.
But let not one customer by doing so interfere with another.

In addition, some organizations (namely the RIAA and the MPAA)
want the authority to cut off internet access of those who
deal in illegal copies of their content. This is a violation
of free speech, and in these days of internet job applications,
a violation of right to work and quite possibly deprivation of
livelyhood. Do not permit this. This is an abomation. These things
must not be taken without a court order that may be defended, and
some of them must be subject to criminal proceedings.

Gentlemen, all things considered, any proposal to eliminate the
network neutrality rules is a bad idea.

* Blocking active worms from spreading is the only known exception.
Even so much as blocking definitely illegal activity is probably
too much as even the phone companies may not do so without first
obtaining a court order.