If you’ve been reading my blog for very long you’ll know I’m a believer that evolutionary forces are at work all around us.  The web behaves very similarly to an evolutionary system, even experiencing punctuated equilibrium as memes …

@26 The speed of your connection is a de facto limit, since you can only use as much bandwidth as the speed of your connection allows. More important, *this is priced in* by the ISPs/telcos already. Your suggestion lets us pay twice for the privilege of a high speed connection. Bandwidth limiters are generally a bad idea. Look at broadband penetration and costs in countries where this is the norm, vs. countries where it isn’t.

Also look at it this way. I pay my ISP for a connection. A web site pays their ISP for a connection. One set of packets routes between them. So we’re already paying twice for transmission. Your suggestion actually allows us to pay 3 or 4 times depending on how it’s implemented.

Telcos simply want to suck more money out of the pipes because they don’t like the flat rate models. Hence QoS bullshit, “the pipes are full” arguments, and trying to meter high-bandwidth applications.

It will just turn into something not worth using. They will just bring in Internet 2 — total censorship. Government will say its for better “performance” and the kiddy gamers will fall for it.

The EU is looking like a better and better place to be…

Unless the US start sticking up for its citizens, it looks like we’re going China-Lite.

Kiss our rights goodbye….

About 5 months back I decided to get away from comcast as a cable and internet provider. So I cancelled my internet service with comcast and went with you (only because you were the only other option). Later I discovered that DirectTV wont work from my apartment because of a tree right outside blocking the signal.

So now I have Comcast for cable and you guys for internet. If you start interfering with my internet traffic (which you don’t need to because it’s none of your business. I pay you my hard earned dollars to bring me the fucking internet as is) I promise you that I will go back to comcast (atleast they are faster).

Regards
-Random Guy

Moderators: I`ve posted links to the past stories about this in June of 2007; they are still awaiting moderation. Could someone get to it ?

Piracy brings innovation and innovation equals a better quality life for everyone! Media and innovation always but heads, but in the end innovation wins and media does too. THey (media) just fight their way to better fortunes … silly of them to do so!

This is not the solution …. rather a new market is!

But the implication is bad; being allowed to do step 1, they’ll proceed to step 2 and step 3, eventually hurting this net neutrality thing — its exact definitions aside.. and not hard to imagine that one day they’ll simply block the majority of p2p traffic (or charge extra — to compensate their “investments” in their filtering technology and staffing, and whatnot.)

For example, this ISP I’m on, simply block all the outbound email (SMTP port 25) for all their residential broadband customers (for over a year by now), because the administrative cost for them to curtail email spammers became a burden. Sure, they provided one solution, that all emails be first routed to their smtp relay host — certainly not to the liking of many. Why I’m still using them? Good question (fixed contract term), but not for too long very soon. Their [not invalid] reason – people use webmail these days anyways. That’s right. So they dare to do it heavy handed and worry no massive attrition. Good for them.

But filtering, at the ISP or telco level (on the backbone nodes) or at the consumer level (on the DSL or cable box) is really a totally unefficient solution.

And lets take the NBC’s guy quote into perspective, he’s saying that P2P is all about copyright theft. As we already know with Comcast it’s not that hard to throttle BitTorrent. Unfortunately with these guys, it’s a case of where there’s a will, there may well be a way.

Unfortunately, since you couldn’t say no to your own personal “need” to steal and thumb your nose at “the man”…a grownup has to come solve the problem it for you.

Stop acting like children, and police yourselves…then you don’t need Big Brother anymore. Then again, you might find that you’ve waited too long. Big Brother, once in the door, may not be so eager to leave.