ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.
Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes....
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I don't want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.
But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.
Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as "flash worms" or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it's causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.
And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn't speech; it's fully-automated malware activity.
¹ From Andy Warhol's aphorism that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
Yeah ok, that's like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.
that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources
First question: how?