Hal Burgiss wrote: > > On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 09:47:20PM +0000, Jonathan M. Slivko wrote: > > > > Mark is absolutely right in this case, all we are really paying for > > is the connection and the bandwidth and that's the end of it, > > whatever the customer does with it is protected under the first > > ammendment, barring anything illegal that may be done or anything > > that is done to harm, frighten, etc. > > Is this the agreement you have with your ISP? In writing? Or what you > think you *should* have? I've not run across an ISP that just gives > bandwidth with no restrictions. The ones I know have a Terms of > Service agreement, or Acceptable Use Policy, that you tacitly agree to > when you use their service -- NOT when you signed up. This tells you > in legalese what you can and cannot do. If yours is like mine, they > even have fine print that says they reserve the right to change these > conditions whenver they want, without prior notice, and you are giving > them permission to do this just by using the service. The very, very > fine print says 'if you don't like it, go stuff yourself'.
Hmm... I understand that this kind of fine print has as much legal strength as that of Microsoft's EULA. The one that says that by opening the package you agree to the terms in the EULA. To the best of my knowledge, there is no legal strength in that, except for the lawyer muscle a big corporation can muster against smaller guys. > The > traditional way to resolve these customer/provider disputes is that > the customer finds a provider that sees things his way. Not the other > way around. I agree on this. the best protest against a lousy service is to leave it and give your money to someone who delivers up to your standards. Another alternative is to get in touch with other users of the service who are dissatisfied with the TOS and excert group pressure on the company. They probably don't mind a single user leaving for the competition, but losing 10% market share might scare the sh*t out of them. Finaly, you will get to see why a commercial grade connection costs about 10 times as much as a home connection of similar bandwidth. When you contract a commercial grade connection, you get the following (all of which don't usually come in home grade connections): - Static IP addresses (usually a /28 segment or more). - Ability to set up servers freely (limited by the address space provided). - Service level agreement (with or without fines). Some ISPs will also give you access to their caching servers, news feed, etc. Others might setup some monitoring of your services. The list goes on and on, but all these niceties are only available to heavily charged customers. I recently requested some quotes for this type of service, and the price was about US$ 350 / month. Are you willing to pay that much for internet access? Cheers, -- Javier Gostling Ingeniero de Sistemas Virtualia S.A. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fono: +56 (2) 202-6264 x 130 Fax: +56 (2) 342-8763 Av. Kennedy 5757, of 1502 Las Condes Santiago Chile _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
