On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 09:39:17PM -0500, The Fool wrote: > To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to > most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor > and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element > can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, > which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the > industry�s new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce > a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the > so-called "bandwidth hog."
This is a GOOD thing. Bandwidth costs money to provide, and is a limited resource. It makes perfect sense to charge based on how much bandwidth is used, that is how a free market works. If you try to suppress the law of supply and demand, you get shortages and outages, much like what happened with power in California. This essay is misguided, and the comparison to the airwaves is false (cables and routers cost money to install and maintain, unlike "airwaves" which could be used in peer-to-peer fashion without any expense by a 3rd party). The problem you should be worried about is ISP's who try to control content of the bandwidth used, not ISP's who want to charge market rates for bandwidth use. Already most cable modem companies prohibit running certain services on your computer, such as a web server or some peer-to-peer file sharing programs. My previous ISP, Optimum Online, actually blocked port 80 so it was impossible to run a web server. Some ISP's even forbid you to run SMTP (email) services, and Earthlink recently stopped accepting email from people who run their own mail servers. These are the types of things you should be worrying about. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
