[ NNSquad ] Re: Comments on NNSquad Purpose

[Brett Glass <nnsquad@brettglass.com>]

At 02:17 PM 11/8/2007, Andrew C Burnette wrote:
 
>Brett,
>
>With all due respect of course,
>
>Filesharing in and of itself is neither abusive, nor unlawful. 

Use of applications which attempt to take over the network is abusive.
BitTorrent, Limewire, etc. are good examples. BitTorrent and Limewire in
particular "invite" the entire world to bombard your network with requests for
files, in such a way that even if the ISP attempts to throttle the onslaught
its upstream bandwidth is still consumed by the unending flood of requests.
It's like spreading hamburger all over someone's lawn. Every dog in the
neighborhood will soon be there annoying the poor victim even if you are long
gone.

And to set up a server on a residential connection where servers are
prohibited is a breach of contract. Those terms are clearly spelled out in our
contract and general terms of service, and also in those of Verizon and
Comcast.

Also, at least 99% of all file "sharing" is in fact illegal piracy of
copyrighted material. (The infinitesimal portion that remains can be done by
other means. For example, if you want the latest FreeBSD distro, you can get
it via FTP as I do.) We're a small ISP. We can't afford a lawsuit from the
RIAA or being shut down by the FBI (which might take all of our servers as
"evidence").

If you continue on the tack of defining "network neutrality" as requiring ISPs
to tolerate abuse or lose money on customers, you will not have a chance of
getting ANY provider to work with you. And these things really don't have to
do with "neutrality" anyway, which is why I propose that the definition be
limited to non-discrimination among LEGAL content providers who use
non-abusive techniques to disseminate their content.

--Brett Glass