If you’ve followed our coverage (“Kiwi Farms, the Infamous Alt-Right Hate Forum, Might Be off the Clearnet for Good“), you know that the infamous Kiwi Farms site has become a locus non grata on the Internet.  They’ve migrated from provider to provider to proivder, even asking on LowEndTalk for BGP help.

Whether you like their content, agree with their views, are a free speech absolutist, or think KF is the worst thing since Pol Pot, the question we’re looking at here is what’s legal.  This is the net neutrality story.  While a particular web host may have a policy that says “we don’t allow this kind of content,” the top tiers of network providers are supposed to be neutral.  Indeed, if they’re not, they can lose various legal protections.  Those protections are designed to swing both ways: in exchange for not being held responsible for every potential content problem (you can’t sue Verizon if someone libels you via SMS), they let the bits flow.

Enter IncogNET

Now we turn to IncogNET, one of the net’s strongest free speech hosts, run by the community’s legendary @MannDude:

Here’s some background from MannDude:

We were announcing a /48 of IPv6 under our ASN (AS210630) for 1776 Solutions (AS397702) [aka KF — raindog308].  Our upstream for this subnet was Crunchbits ( AS400304 ) who peers directly with Hurricane Electric (AS6939). Their other upstream hadn’t yet updated their filter list as they do manual route updates on a lengthier timetable. As a result, it was single homed to Hurricane Electric only.

The announcement was literally for IPv6 only, nothing else, and the announcement was live probably a week or less. I’d have to check to see exactly when it went live, but on the morning of July 27th I woke up and had a message from our client saying, “Hey, something happened with the IPv6 announcement”, so naturally I check with Crunchbits. Was told, “Interesting – so HE is denying specifically that /48 for some reason. We are announcing to them.” They state they’ve received no complaints or communication from HE, nor have we. Since they’re HE’s direct customer, they reached out to them to find out what the reasoning may be on our behalf.

Check out the LowEndTalk thread titled “IncogNET filed an official complaint against HE with the Attorney General of Washington State“, which quoted a tweet by IncogNET:

Today we filed an official complaint against @henet (Hurricane Electric) with the @AGOWA (Attorney General of Washington State) over their censorship of legal and protected speech. We have also reached out to the @EFF who has previously shown support in protecting the foundation… pic.twitter.com/im8hkAZLZE

— IncogNET (@IncogNetLLC) July 29, 2023

From KF itself, there was a post (page 1, page 2):

Hurricane Electric, one of the largest ISPs in the entire world, has blocked 1776 Hosting’s IPs which
very briefly (-2 days) was a way to connect to the Kiwi Farms.

Hurricane Electric admits that blocking an entire subnet of IP addresses like this is unprecedented.  They refuse to elaborate as to why they’ve done this.

HE is an extremely old, extremely large provider which owns an enormous share of all fiber optic cable in the world. Their connectivity between smaller ISPs is unparalleled. Their bandwidth is over 100Tbps. If every nerve in your body is connected to each other, much like two computers on the Internet, then Hurricane Electric would effectively be your spine – hence why they are called the Internet Backbone. The Internet Backbone is telling a small forum of a few thousand daily users that they may not exist, they will not explain why, and they are not open to meeting halfway. However, our relationship with HE was indirect. 1776 Hosting had a relationship with an ISP, who itself had a relationship with another ISP, who has a relationship with Hurricane Electric. HE did not terminate a relationship with me, they instead obstructed my providers from receiving traffic they specifically requested because Hurricane Electric does not allow it, without stated reason, and without appeal.

Broadband?

KF goes on to quote a law particular to the state of Washington (USA):

(2) A person engaged in the provision of broadband internet access service in Washington state, insofar as the person is so engaged, may not:

(a) Block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management;

(b) Impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a nonharmful device, subject to reasonable network management;

Is providing IP transit the same as “broadband”?  I am not a lawyer.  You could read that “engaged in the provision of broadband” may mean “you sell that service,” not “this law applies only to that part of your service”.  Or you could read it as “while you’re engaged in th provision of broadband…”

One thing I’ve learned about the law is that parsing a single sentence out of context based on how you understand it is foolhardy – part of being a lawyer is understanding the context and how courts have interpreted words and concepts.  Worth noting that the paragraph immediately proceeding that states:

Any person providing broadband internet access service in Washington state shall publicly disclose accurate information regarding the network management practices, performance characteristics, and commercial terms of its broadband internet access services sufficient to enable consumers to make informed choices regarding the purchase and use of such services and entrepreneurs and other small businesses to develop, market, and maintain internet offerings.

MannDude did have Washington’s net neutrality law in mind when he migrated services from Idaho to Washington:

Basically, one of the reasons why I was keen on moving servers from Idaho to Washington State when Crunchbits opened a location in Liberty Lake, Washington was due to Washington State’s Net Neutrality laws that I was hoping would help provide some protection for controversial speech. There is a heated debate on Twitter right now involving people such as a literal META employee who is on the board of the Seattle Internet Exchange, I’ve seen a lawyer or two chime in, etc over this topic. Truthfully, I don’t know who is right and who is wrong, but at the end of the day Hurricane Electric acted in an unprofessional manner and I think the larger topic at hand needs more light shined on it.

Hurricane Electric’s Silence

HE has been pretty close-lipped about why they took this action.  I mean, yes, obviously it’s about Kiwi Farms.  But shouldn’t they at least point to what section or their AUP or what law they feel prevents them from accepting this prefix?  According to @MannDude, apparently they don’t think so:

Hurricane Electric responded after some time to their email simply stating, “Unfortunately, we can not accept this prefix at this time.” That was it. Nothing else. The following day, the same person responded stating it was due to an AUP violation, and that he can not elaborate further on the details of said AUP violation. He mentioned that it was a rare case and only seen a couple of times in his long career of near 20 years with the company.

He contrasts HE with how a different provider reacted:

It’s common knowledge we previously had it on our network in the Netherlands, and the datacenter we use there (Worldstream) was very cordial and polite about it but told us we needed to remove them from our network, citing that pending legislation may make a site like that illegal in their country and that it being in the news they didn’t want associated with it. I’d have to dig up that old email, so that is paraphrasing from memory, but they didn’t give a harsh deadline to remove it. Didn’t nullroute the IP. None of that. They acted professionally about the entire ordeal. Props to them for that, as that is how something like this should be handled… This was earlier in the year, likely within a month of Cloudflare dropping them, so it was still a pretty hot topic at the time.

Fast forward to last week, Hurricane Electric acted in a manner that no reasonable person could defend. Dropping the route to the subnet in the middle of the night with zero notice, no complaints, no message after the fact… Just simply denying the route from their network, and later, to the entire larger subnet that the /48 itself was splintered from. An extremely unprofessional approach.

IncogNET also reached out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Truthfully, in the legal sense, I don’t know who is “right” in this, which is why I reached out to the EFF as well to request any guidance, council, advice, or resources to help protect free speech on the internet. Basically all I received from them (so far) is a link to a blog post and a message stating they were keeping an eye on the situation. As a small business, we’re not a huge EFF donor, we simply can’t be, but we do donate and support them as they claim to be proponents of free and open internet and supporters of free speech. I’m hoping that they may be able to offer something, whether it just be advice based on experience of such issues or anything more.

The EFF replied with a standard acknowledgement:

Hi Curtis,

I wanted to update you that our team is investigating the situation, and we’ll be in touch.

Thanks for your patience.

Core Issues

MannDude summarizes the situation as follows:

Should ISPs like Hurricane Electric be allowed to deny routes to legal content and protected speech under the First Amendment? Are they allowed to, in the state of Washington? Would the same people who say “Yes” to those questions feel the same way if they were blocking access to HRT information, a political site, or news resources based on the personal opinions the CEO or CTO of a transit provider? These are some good questions.

Kiwi Farms is a polarizing site.  Even some people who think anything and everything should be online sometimes shy away from KF.  They’re one of a small handful of sites that have been banned by Cloudflare:

• The Daily Stormer: a white supremacist site, though their banning may have more to do with their persistant claims that CF endorsed their views or else CF wouldn’t allow them.  CF apparently disagreed.  Worth noting that this was the first site CF banned and the resulting firestorm made them gunshy about banning anyone else.  Worth noting that CF still hosts Stormfront, one of the oldest white supremacist sites.
• 8chan: This action was taken in the wake of mass shootings, and amid complaints that the site hosted child pornography.
• Switter: likely over concerns regarding legal liability regarding new prostitution and trafficking laws rather than any specific content

…and KF.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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