Comment How do you write a law that allows blocking spam? (Score 1) 248
I'm all for network neutrality as a CONCEPT. As someone who has been running servers for decades I don't see how Washington can make a LAW requiring network neutrality that doesn't blow up in our faces.
An ISP gets hundreds of thousands of connection attempts from known email spammers every day. The volume of other attacks can be measured in how many hit you per minute. You absolutely MUST block and prioritize traffic based on its origin in order to have any hope of running a usable network. If Washington says you can't block or slow traffic based on the source and other attributes, email pretty much stops working. Worms will spread much faster. It becomes illegal to protect yourself or your customers from even the simplest of DOS attacks. In general, things would just get real nasty real fast. I'd need to see a proposal that looks like it might possibly work before I could support a law on the issue.
Though I know what some of the unintended consequences would be, there are always others that we don't foresee - every law causes some problem, so we should be careful about passing new federal laws.
Secondly, what is the motivation for this? We're afraid of something that COULD happen. We come up with hypothetical scenarios, but none of this is real - it hasn't happened. If it does happen, do we not already have laws about "unfair competition", "tortious interference", etc? Doesn't it make more sense to be alert, be watchful for any real problems, and see if our existing laws about unfair competition and such work as needed?
Why such a rush to pass laws that we know will cause problems, to stop a possible problem that doesn't yet exist?