The actual statement read fairly explicit and useful to me. I'm no expert though. Basically:
No blocking.
No throttling.
Increased transparency
No paid prioritization
Same rules apply to mobile internet
It's all subject to the caveat that the FCC is independent and they decide how and what exactly is implemented.
Those sound to me like the basic and less controversial components of net neutrality. It prevent disadvantaging specific sites, protocols or users if applied in a reasonable way.
Obama's statement isn't quite as limp as the article title implied: "I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization"
This isn't a request to "set up a committee to explore regulation ideas and form lobby groups from all stakeholders" - it sounds more like "I want to pass laws AND create an enforcement structure for those laws".
Ambitious and probably overly optimistic, but it's a good perspective from the top.
Well, the enforcement structure is already in place, AFAIK. This is just putting his finger on the scale as the FCC ponders the issues (and implying that if the FCC doesn't make the right choice by itself, it could be compelled by law).
Yeah - the general FCC structure is in place, but it sounds like the regulatory structure/principle is still being worked out. I suspect that it will be just another political football for a very long time, though...
"At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers."
They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.
Apart from the external-facing proxy (which is the most exposed link in this setup), these VMs don't need any sort of public presence. Unless the provider inspects processes running on all their customers machines, all they can see is a VM with opaque VPN connections to a few external ips.
I think only the load balancer would be vulnerable to discovery. Everything behind the load balancer could be a secure connection to a completely different datacenter if needed.
"If someone is paying the bill, do they really care?"
So you could cross reference names of the people raided with payment information of the VPS providers (usual suspects or top "n" providers let's say). Of course that could be hidden as well.
Other issue is how does anyone know this isn't misinformation anyway and that the VPS providers don't play a role or not as much of a role as is indicated. Just because someone is writing this or because they said it?
What advantage does it have for anyone (like this) to reveal anything about how they are situated security wise if not to lead people off the beaten track even given some possible marketing advantage?
It's not about the money, it's about not being able to care and survive as a business.
Because then they would also have to care about the thousands of other VM's that may run all kinds of stuff that is illegal somewhere, questionable, politically, socially, culturally or commercially sensitive etcetera.
No ISP can afford to be proactive about this. They cannot afford to care. Or even know.
