How can it possibly be, that an ISP, which I’m paying for gets to decid, which sites I’m allowed to have access to, and which not?
All the torrenting sites are restricted. I know, I can use VPN, and such… but I want to do it because of my privacy concerns and not because of some higher-up decided to bend over for the lobbying industry.
While on the other hand, if there’s a data breach of a legit big-corp website (looking at you FB), I’m still able to access it, they get fined with a fraction of their revenue, and I’m still left empty-handed. What a hipocracy!!
What comes next? Are they gonna restrict me from using lemmy too, bc some lobbyist doesn’t like the fact that it’s a decentralized system which they have no control over?
Rant, over!
I didn’t even know that my router was using my ISPs DNS, and that I can just ditch it, even though I’m running AdGuard (selfhosted)
I don’t know where you’re from and therefore don’t know what laws affect you but unless the ISP is involved in the media game (i.e HBO & AT&T) they don’t care about restricting access. In fact, they’re against it in most scenarios because if a competitor that doesn’t restrict access to piracy related websites exists, that competitor is likely to siphon customers from ISPs who impose restrictions.
On top of that, most ISPs do the absolute bare minimum to restrict your access so that you can bypass it easily, the most common being the modification of DNS records which you can easily bypass by changing your resolver.
TL:DR blame your lawmakers not your isp
The DNS modification is slightly off. Some ISPs check UDP packets since they are insecure and will modify query results regardless of the DNS server you are sending to. Mediacom is known to do this for their billing and DMCA systems. They use DNS redirection to assist in MITMing the connection to load their own certificate to your browser. With that done, they can prepend their own Javascript to the response they receive from whatever web server you are trying to contact. That’s how they get their data usage and DMCA popups loaded when you load up whatever site.
Even if it is not being done for a malicious reason, it is still a malicious practice. Websites can help prevent this by adopting wildcard Subject Alternate Names in their certificates thereby making the redirection much less likely to succeed, but you shouldn’t have to view your own ISP as a threat actor.
