NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: FCC Hearing tomorrow (Monday, 25-02-2008)
At 07:03 PM 2/25/2008, Warren Kumari wrote: >Nope, your USERS are setting up a server on your network -- if Vuze >snuck in with a 1U box and hooked it up to your Ethernet, installed >some software (without your users permission, and without explaining >that this would use your users upload capacity), etc, then I would >agree with you. The effect is exactly the same as if they DID sneak a physical box onto our network. But they're being doubly insidious. They aren't telling users that their machines are going to become free servers for their content; they aren't warning users that they are likely being induced to violate their providers' terms of service and might be cut off for doing it; and they are being disingenuous when they claim that all of this is about "freedom" rather than padding their pockets. (They undoubtedly want to get a leg up on YouTube, which DOES pay its own freight.) >Yup, explain to them that they are not allowed to do this, and why.... We do. >Ok, if your TOS says that Anne cannot run servers, and you have >defined servers to include Vuze, clearly explaining to Anne how her >actions are violating the TOS, and that the TOS exists so that you >can continue to provide her service is a reasonable way to start. We do that. In fact, we tell users when they sign up that these are not permissible uses, just in case they did not read the full ToS. We still do have some kids who try to run BitTorrent and are disappointed when they find that it performs poorly if at all. We offer a refund and advise them to try our competitors. (Isn't competition wonderful?) They can bring our competitors' networks to their knees, but not ours. >You explain to your users that they are buying a >service that doesn't allow things like Vuze. If they want to do >something like Vuze, you will upsell them to this other rate plan >that provides them with the following features. You then set the rate >for the upgraded service to be high enough to cover your costs, We've tried that. Not one has taken us up on it, though. Use of P2P seems to correlate with unwillingness to pay for the bandwidth it consumes (sigh). >I also still do not view it as Vuze abusing your network. If Apache >allows one of your users to download and install a webserver on their >PC, are you going to be annoyed with Apache or with your user? If anyone makes installing their software a precondition for getting a service, and does not FULLY DISCLOSE what it does (Vuze glosses over it and doesn't warn users that they will become a server for the whole Internet and use lots of bandwidth doing it), they are wronging both us and the user. >Or, >maybe a better example is if one of your users suddenly decided that >they will be a CPAN mirror, who do you shout at? They won't have a public IP on a residential connection, so they can't exactly do that. (IPs cost us $10 a month each from our upstream, so we reserve them for business class connections. A residential user is much safer without a public IP, too.) --Brett Glass