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 called Tier 2 and 3), all the way up to Tier 1 ISPs (or the Internet backbone) that have no direct relationships with most users.
Tier 1 ISPs play a unique role in the internet “stack,” because numerous other service providers depend on Tier 1 companies to serve their customers. As a result, Tier 1 providers can be especially powerful chokepoints—given their reach, their content policies can affect large swaths of the web. At the same time given their distant relationship to speakers, Tier 1 ISPs have little if any context to make good decisions about their speech.
At EFF, we have long represented and assisted people from around the world—and across various political spectrums—facing censorship. That experience tells us that one of the most dangerous types of censorship happens at the site of a unique imbalance of power in the structures of the internet: when an internet service is both necessary for the web to function and simultaneously has no meaningful alternatives. That’s why EFF has long argued that we must “protect the stack” by saying no to infrastructure providers policing internet content. We’ve warned that endorsing censorship in one context can (and does) come back to bite us all when, inevitably, that same approach is used in another context. Pressure on basic infrastructure, as a tactic, will be re-used, inevitably, against unjustly marginalized speakers and forums. It already is.
So we were concerned when we started hearing from multiple sources that Hurricane Electric, a Tier 1 ISP, is interfering with traffic. Confirmation of the details has been difficult, in part because Hurricane itself has refused to respond to our queries, but it appears that the company is partially denying service to a direct customer, a provider called Crunchbits, in order to disrupt traffic to a site that is several steps away in the stack. And it is justifying that action because activity on the site reportedly viola
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