Further comment after reading more of the notice:

The draft also seeks comment in Paragraph 28 on whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other is a separate question from the question of what capabilities they provide.

Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point-to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is.

Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for any additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that ISPs, not users, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the service of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--somewhere, not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address to the user's computer, corresponding to a domain name, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just realizes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints.

Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, more generally, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is added to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks.