Controversial Internet Providers

NANOG is the most well know networking email list. NANOG is nice enough to offer their email list archives as a download. So we went ahead and downloaded all the archives from 2008 until 2016. We went through these and removed all the text that was duplicated due to email replies. We also got rid of all the subject lines. From there we had a pretty decent set of unique text that represents the last 8 years of NANOG.

We then ran a pretty simple word count to see the number of lines that a certain network's name or ASN was mentioned. This gives us a very rough idea of how controversial a network is. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing, it just means that some networks are talked about more so than others.

Larger networks are obviously going to be talked about more than smaller networks. But at the same time, networks with a lot of outages are going to have people complaining about them more often. Our script would have to be a lot more sophisticated to be able to read the context of the network's name to see if the network is being mentioned in a positive or negative light. We simply provide a rough idea of how often a network is mentioned on the NANOG list.

Also note that NANOG is a North American organization. The emails are almost entirely in English. This means that the networks serving North America are much more likely to be talked about than those serving other parts of the world.

We searched not only for the network's name, but also for their ASN. A network may have a number of nicknames or different ways of writing their name (Hurricane Electric, HE; China Telecom, CT, etc.) but the AS is not going to be abbreviated.

And the most controversial ISPs are: