Cox Communications and DMCA

This morning I woke up to find my internet service down, a year ago I switched from FiOS to COX and have been a very happy customer. There were no outages, no throttling, consistent billing, all sunshine and rainbows.

So I did what the rest of us do rebooted the modem, pinged 8.8.8.8 and found I still couldn’t get out.

So naturally I tried an mtr to the COX west coast DNS Server.

$ sudo mtr 68.111.106.68 -r
HOST: Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
 1.| — 10.0.1.1 0.0% 10 1.5 1.4 1.2 1.6 0.0
 2.| — 10.82.80.1 0.0% 10 9.1 9.6 7.3 13.2 1.7
 3.| — 68.4.14.24 0.0% 10 8.4 9.2 7.8 12.3 1.1
 4.| — 68.4.11.72 0.0% 10 10.0 11.2 9.5 17.7 2.3
 5.| — ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

Oh great, looks like I found backbone outage, let me jump on twitter and contact them to let them know. Five minutes later I was contacted by COX Customer Support after shooting them screen shots of my traces they explained Security had suspended my account and I would need to contact customer service.

After waiting on hold for about half an hour I got in touch with a COX representative who explained to me that they had received DMCA notifications pointing to my network and questioned if I had an unsecured WiFi connection as I was totally unfamiliar with the content in question.

I explained, “yes, in fact I do.” I recently had wireless networking authentication issues with my printer that required me to leave a guest network open in order for me to print. So now we have a situation where the FCC and a few dinosaur broadcast companies are dictating to me how I can setup my internal network at home, maybe Tom Wheeler can come over and fix my printer otherwise we can continue to fill up ISP customer service queues with wasteful DMCA notifications.