NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: FCC Hearing tomorrow (Monday, 25-02-2008)
At 02:50 PM 2/25/2008, Rahul Tongia wrote: >How does an application provider take your bandwidth instead of customers doing so? Vuze, Blizzard, and Skyp (to name just three companies) require users to install P2P software to use their services. Once the users do this, their machines are transformed into servers that operate on behalf of those companies, consuming our ISP's bandwidth to re-transmit those companies' for-profit content. After the download, those servers continue to suck bandwidth out of our network. What a great business plan for these companies -- infinite free bandwidth, and the users' ISPs foot the bill! The users usually do not realize what they are installing, or that it violates our terms of service, or that their machines have been turned into servers without their knowledge. It's really not much different than when a user's machine is turned into a "zombie" or "spambot", except that the attack is directed against the ISP rather than the user. The user is most often completely ignorant of what has occurred and does not realize that he or she has been induced to violate our terms of service (since setting up a server on our network for the content provider is a precondition for receiving the content). If I were a large and litigious company, I might well sue Vuze for tortious interference with contract, because that is, at bottom, what they're doing (not to mention taking our very expensive bandwidth). --Brett Glass