FCC swivels to online privacy, gets bitten in the ass by net neutrality When America's comms watchdog the FCC passed its net neutrality rules despite an onslaught of criticism from telcos, the world rejoiced. But, as many of us noted at the time, the Open Internet Order was achieved through an imperfect approach: equating internet providers with phone companies by deciding they are Title II …
A slight thing that is not mentioned, but is incredibly important. According to the article, the modem's MAC address is the closest thing to the POTS telephone number for Internet communication, not IP addresses. They use that to conclude that ISPS don't have greater visibility and control over user web information. This is absolutely and categorically incorrect. Who has the mapping between the IP address and the modem's MAC address? The ISP does. It has to know to which modem to route the IP traffic to the last 'mile', so it maintains a map between home modem MAC addresses and network IP addresses. On top of that, the ISP also needs that table so that people don't connect some old modem and get service without paying for it, as well as controlling the network speed the user gets based upon what network access tier they are paying for. On top of that, all traffic from the ISP's network goes out through their routers (and any sniffers, filters etc that they apply).
Websites don't know the router's MAC address and the ISP doesn't know the MAC address of anything on the router's LAN. Everything is routed by IP address so if a MAC address is a telephone number, it's a super secret one that no one else can call anyway because other telephone exchanges don't understand it.
You know what else is an old law? The constitution and its amendments.
I only see "It's the end of the world, cats and dogs living together", etc.. No explanation WHY equating IPs to telephone numbers is bad. No explanation WHY making ISPs just dumb pipes that pass packets around is bad.
So to me this looks more like a list of people being paid by the cable industry.
"No explanation WHY equating IPs to telephone numbers is bad."
I was wondering too. From what I know about both, they seem quite similar. We have IANA as an authority for address space. They give out blocks of numbers which then get registered to individual ISPs. And in the phone space we have NANP, the North American Numbering Plan which gives out blocks of telephone numbers for use by CLECs and ILECs. Both the end user and the owner in both cases can route these around as they see fit. Yes, there are some differences, but when you start to look at the politics of control, the two systems seem awfully similar.
They're actually very different.
A telephone number is a name. It has permanence (you keep it over time and can move it to other carriers). It is the input to a lookup process -- the carrier switching system that reaches you has an address (location routing number) and that is looked up in a database before the call is delivered. This is transparent to end users but very visible inside the network.
An IP address is an alias for a single MAC address. It may be transient -- consumers get them temporarily "leased" by DHCP or PPPoE. It may be non-unique -- consumers often get RFC1918 non-public addresses in 10.x, 100.x or other such blocks -- and thus translated in the network to a shared public IP address. Consumer clients generally don't receive connections directly, so there's no equivalent of a phone number -- it's like just calling out.
The FCC screwed the pooch when they declared ISPs to be Title II. That removed them from FTC jurisdiction. The FTC is the expert agency in privacy. The FCC had other options (like moving just the bit-transporting lower layers to Title II, as the law intended) but instead bowed to political pressure from technical know-nothings. This is the type of mess that results.
A telephone number is a name. It has permanence (you keep it over time and can move it to other carriers). It is the input to a lookup process -- the carrier switching system that reaches you has an address (location routing number) and that is looked up in a database before the call is delivered. This is transparent to end users but very visible inside the network.
It used to be connected to a physical address in the days of copper. This is no longer the case. The number will map to the owner, which will be either an ILEC or CLEC - not an individual user. What their records look like will vary. You can get a phone number without an address and can often give whatever credentials you like and the best trace will be via payment method - just like with an IP. It is also trivial to forward phone numbers so there is a very long way to go to the end user. By the way, you may have noticed the difficulty of tracing phone solicitors.
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