Maine Governor Signs Strictest Internet Protections in the U.S.

https://www.govtech.com/policy/Maine-Governor-Signs-Strictest-Internet-Protections-in-the-US.html

by eplanit • 7 years ago

256 107 7 years ago

govtech.com

matttproud• 7 years ago

Consistency and compliance costs be damned; I am pleased that localities are taking this matter seriously.

The status quo lack for user data protection is appalling.

snarf212• 7 years ago

While I applaud this kind of effort, it seems like it will have little effect in the end. Companies will just violate it anyway and get a small fine. Or they will just get the law replaced when the makeup of the government changes.

It seems like we have two issues: politicians who don't really understand the technical ramifications around the laws and issues; and politicians who don't really care and just want their funding. It feels like the only way to make them both really get it is to use some form of hacktivism. Would we like a law to prevent robocalling? Then use our technological expertise to robocall all numbers related to these officials non-stop and have the message be "Pass a law to stop robo-calling". Worried about ISPs selling your data? Then use our technological expertise to buy this data from the ISPs and correlate the data and make public all the details of the data about these politicians and those related. Maybe this is nonsense but it seems like the only way to make it real for them.

testvox• 7 years ago

Their response won't be to pass a robocalling law, it will be to send the police to your house to arrest you for harassment which is already illegal.

ceejayoz2• 7 years ago

Companies will just violate it anyway and get a small fine.

Which is precisely why the GDPR's enormous maximum fines are a good thing, in my book. Minor and unintentional violations can be treated with leniency, but a large organization that's repeatedly and deliberately compromising the privacy of millions can wind up paying for it in an actually noticeable manner.

jdreyfuss• 7 years ago

This specific law may not have a large effect in and of itself, but having something like this out there can set the stage for future change as well. Momentum is very much a thing in politics, so anything that takes steps in the right direction could ultimately contribute to getting that ball rolling

belenos462• 7 years ago

Yes! Yes, we're finally in the news for something good, not something our social cancer of a former governor did!

kibwen2• 7 years ago

Hey now, you managed to be the first state to pass ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections back in 2016; here in Massachusetts we're jealous that we only might manage to bring it up for a vote or ballot initiative this year. :)

belenos462• 7 years ago

Ugh, I wish we had. Until we stuff through a (state) constitutional amendment,

"The bill does not allow ranked-choice voting to be used for general and special elections for the offices of Governor, State Senator, or State Representative unless there is an amendment to the Constitution of Maine, Article IV, Part First, Section 5, Article IV, Part Second, Sections 4 and 5 and Article V, Part First, Section 3 that authorizes the Legislature, by proper enactment, to determine the method by which the Governor and members of the State Senate and House of Representatives are elected is ratified."[0]

It's like we've got a bunch of TODOs spread all over our legislation.

[0] http://legislature.maine.gov/lawlibrary/ranked-choice-voting...

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

Rejoice therefore.

I'm in Wisconsin, and man do I wish we would be in the news for anything other than something our social cancer of a former governor did. :(

Last week I was watching some comedians on a cable show. Trying to avoid late night comedians because we're always the butt of jokes over there. In any case, it's on in the background and I'm sort of paying attention enough to follow. All of a sudden I hear, "Wisconsin!" Followed by the comedy club's audience laughing.

And I'm thinking to myself, "Man? Did a b-list comedian just tell a joke that featured 'Wisconsin' as not only the butt of the joke, but the punchline too?"

A new low.

Oh well, like my neighbor said this weekend, "There's always Florida!" So at least we're not at the bottom.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

Can you summarize Wisconsin politics, I don't know anything about it.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Has any internet provider sold data previously?

They sell ip address, websites visited, and home address?

ToFab123• 7 years ago

Yes. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/congress_approves_s...

module0000• 7 years ago

If someone could give some more information, I'm very interested in this. I always assumed this was taking place, but I'd love to hear from someone involved or with knowledge of that industry. Who do ISPs sell it to? What type of money is involved?

sseveran• 7 years ago

A team I worked on tried to buy browsing histories for specific sites about 10 years ago. NetZero was selling them from their free dialup customers, but the data was not that useful as the demographics of users was super skewed. All the ISPs that people tend to think are evil absolutely refused to even entertain the idea. One of them even lectured our PM on privacy and ethics for a few minutes before ending the call.

You can buy advertising profiles (or access to them) but this not really useful for things that are not directly advertising as it is super aggregated. In general the ISP data is less valuable since so much of the web has moved to using SSL.

I don't know much about how this has changed over the last couple of years but maybe someone else can chime in.

aj7• 7 years ago

When my internet connection slows down, I just run Speedtest once or twice. My providers detect that and restore the bandwidth they’d been stealing.

edraferi• 7 years ago

Ugh

willio58• 7 years ago

This is terrible.

mtgx• 7 years ago

Land of the fr...pay through your nose and still get screwed.

icxa• 7 years ago

I've noticed this as well, except with fast.com

I will fire up the laptop, be getting 3.2-12 mbps, all of a sudden a fast.com speed test starts of sluggish and ramps up to 120-200 mbps.

Go figure. It happens every time, on multiple occasions, devices, browsers, all using the same internet connection and frequency.

ilikehurdles• 7 years ago

I'm happy and yet disappointed to see I'm not the only one this works for.

Video bufferring frequently? Start a speedtest, problem (temporarily) solved!

dooglius• 7 years ago

I'm surprised, I thought it was run by Netflix so that they'd also have to boost all Netflix traffic. Maybe they are doing DPI? Netflix also has a "test video" somewhere that is probably a more representative test.

thrower123• 7 years ago

Now I'm tempted to try this, and write a little daemon that runs every hour or two and kicks it off. I wonder if they would pick up on it.

milkytron• 7 years ago

I was doing this for a very long time. I had a speedtest run on my NAS, saved the results to a csv, and then tweet them at verizon. a few others have written similar scripts, it’s very interesting having that historical data, and Verizon reps on twitter actually tried talking to the bot.

vageli• 7 years ago

Some network gear has this as a feature.

caseyohara• 7 years ago

Someone did something like that: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/comca...

A Comcast customer who is dissatisfied with Internet speeds set up a Raspberry Pi to automatically tweet at Comcast each time speeds are much lower than advertised.
"I pay for 150Mbps down and 10Mbps up," Reddit user AlekseyP wrote over the weekend. "The Raspberry Pi runs a series of speed tests every hour and stores the data. Whenever the down[load] speed is below 50Mbps the Pi uses a Twitter API to send an automatic tweet to Comcast listing the speeds. I know some people might say I should not be complaining about 50Mbps down, but when they advertise 150 and I get 10-30 I am unsatisfied."

jniedrauer• 7 years ago

I actually do this too, with similar results. I use the python speedtest-cli module. Works great. Very sad that it works, but it does.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 7 years ago

Wow. I didn't know this. I just tested my FIOS connection. I pay for 75/75. I did an mLab test (not well-known, but Google uses them). It said my download was about 30MBpS. Then I ran the OOkla Test (well-known). It said I was getting 75. Then I ran the mLab again, and this time, it said I was getting 55.

driverdan• 7 years ago

That's not even remotely scientific. You can't make conclusions from three tests.

lisper2• 7 years ago

Or there was just a slowdown caused by temporary congestion somewhere that happened to go away while you were running the speed test.

Kluny• 7 years ago

... every single time.

ademarre• 7 years ago

That sounds similar to the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal.

jeffmould• 7 years ago

I have always thought this conspiracy. I have Comcast Gigabit and more often than not the first speed test always caps around 250-275. If I run more than 2 times I get 980-990 on average. I wondered if it was some kind of prioritization at play here.

j88439h84• 7 years ago

Or speed varies and you only think to run it when it's slow.

IE6• 7 years ago

I've had the same experience though I only noticed that the speed test and pages related to it ran very fast but I got no comparable boost to other traffic.

xiii1408• 7 years ago

Is this actually true, though?

To figure that out, you'd need to do a speed test to the target host, then do another one while simultaneously running Speedtest.

Your Internet speed is also affected by the peering agreements your ISP has, i.e. how "well connected" it is to the ISP of your target host. Speedtest targets (and Fast.com) are pretty well-connected; i.e. they have a lot of peers, so you can get to them in relatively few hops. Many times, they're even run by your ISP, so the number of hops is minimal.

I've noticed there's a big difference in both bandwidth and latency based on the network my requests actually go out on (from my university Internet connection). For some reason, the Univ. of Cal. Network > Commercial ISP > Internet2. (Not sure why Internet2 sucks so much, but it seems really slow for some reason.)

mintplant• 7 years ago

I've observed this effect as well. For example, on wifi at a conference hotel, connections to everything else would significantly improve for a while if I ran Fast.com's speed test in the background. I used this trick throughout the week and it was very reliable.

guptat59• 7 years ago

Sounds somewhat similar to GDPR, does it ?

TheAdamist• 7 years ago

only when maine users start being blocked from websites.

akshayB4• 7 years ago

ISP are becoming annoying middle man who want to make money from any data they can get their hands on. What eventually needs to be done is we classify ISPs as utility. Example - your water supplier doesn't make a big deal if you use more water because you have a swimming pool but you ISP does and I find that very weird.

CondensedBrain2• 7 years ago

Water companies do charge different rates depending on type of usage. Look up your local company's page to see the commercial rate. It could be higher or lower. They all seem to have different priorities based on a quick search of different cities.

akshayB4• 7 years ago

maybe I didn't choose the best example but they don't throttle your water supplies.

bduerst2• 7 years ago

Because water is a tangible, physical natural resource, unlike bandwidth, and billing by zoning helps prevent environmental tragedy of the commons.

tuespetre• 7 years ago

Where I live, we have summer water restrictions. We also have a 12-month running average of usage on our bill, and whatever portion of our expected usage we exceed, we pay extra on.

akshayB4• 7 years ago

Also utilities can be easily regulated even at county level or state level, services (ISPs) can't

zip1234• 7 years ago

Do they even need to be classified as utilities? It seems like there should just be some rules that they have to follow if they use public right of ways for wires. A utility brings with it other baggage that might not be applicable to an ISP.

inetknght2• 7 years ago

Rules... like being neutral to customer data on the network?

akshayB4• 7 years ago

Yeah there needs to be some sort of rules if they are not classified as utilities. I don't want a doctor's office to get shitty internet when doing video conferencing other doctors for opinion while a millionair's kids on same street is hogging all bandwidth by paying a premium to IPS for this gaming console.

fxprq• 7 years ago

Where I live I pay much more for every m3 if I use more than X m3 of water.

w8vY7ER• 7 years ago

Agreed, I think this would be in the general best interest for all customers.

shmageggy• 7 years ago

How valid is the argument that states can't regulate interstate business? Any business that operates over state lines is immune to all local law?

Also claiming that this infringes on ISP free speech? Like Citizens United, applying ideas of personhood to cooperations is just gross.

I'm with the Chamber of Commerce in that the bill doesn't go far enough. Why should giving away our privacy be a prerequisite for doing anything online?

frankharv• 7 years ago

I agree. How could a Federal rule supersedes a state law. If FCC they want the rule that bad the feds need to make it a law. A rule that can be changed by politics is not a law.

paulie_a• 7 years ago

It would be interesting if deleware followed suit.

user51843• 7 years ago

ISPs will just offer slower plans as default and promotions with faster connections for people that consent with data harvesting and monetization. As it's a promotion, regulators can't forbidden promotions. And as ISPs are an oligopoly at best, it will be easy to force most people to consent. Regulators must forbidden data harvesting and selling. But it will not happen because data is the new gold.

awakeasleep• 7 years ago

The bill forbids data sharing consent as precondition to service

user51843• 7 years ago

It's not precondition to service. People will be able to get the service but only lower speeds. Faster connections only opting for the "promotion"

tomd3v• 7 years ago

Maine’s new law does not allow an ISP to offer a discounted rate to customers who agree to share or sell their data.

user51843• 7 years ago

ISP will argue it is not a discount it's a promotion. They are two different things under the law

treis5• 7 years ago

I don't get why ISPs are the only ones singled out for this. More or less everything on the internet is subsidized by data harvesting. What's so special about ISPs that it should be different?

cliff_badger2• 7 years ago

Just like the stupid cookie laws you'll just get a little popup that says: "In order for you to use our internet, you are agreeing to have your data tracked and sold..."

This law prevents absolutely nothing...

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

The law EXPLICITLY prevents that.

cliff_badger2• 7 years ago

I am sorry, I stand corrected. Now that I read the actual bill I see my error.

algaeontoast• 7 years ago

You'd be better off shaking your fist at a blank monitor.

Laws like this are more dangerous than draconian internet legislation or companies doing un-ethical internet things.

These laws make people feel good and feel they've made progress when in reality they've done nothing - the illusion of progress to make one feel good is more damning than doing what these laws were explicitly intended to "prevent".

thwythwy• 7 years ago

"These laws"

OK grandpa, demonstrate you know what the law does and maybe you'll earn a response on the merits. This is just empty nonsense. Who are you quoting?

telaelit• 7 years ago

Yes. This is what should be done on a federal level, but I'm glad states are starting to take up the issue of protecting their citizens.

pard68• 7 years ago

Seems cool. Let me know when I can get speeds faster than 5mbps, and that is because I pay extra for to have two dsl lines.

dang• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061764

Maine Governor Signs Strictest Internet Protections in the U.S.

Related Stories