OT Internet practices (was Re: [Coco] I'm back)

[Theodore Evans (Alex)]

On Feb 15, 2004, at 6:04 PM, Roger Taylor wrote:

> That's true.  There's a lot of ways to serve content or upload data to 
> others.  These greedy policies seem to be designed to increase 
> revenues by giving the company many ways to penalize the customer 
> based on *common mistakes* and very quickly tack an extra $5 to $25 
> onto their bill on a whim.  In my opinion, all types of communication 
> companys seem to be getting their ideas from the same pool of greedy 
> ideas.  Cable companies, satelite dish tv, ISPs, the telephone 
> company, celphone companies, etc.  I could go on and on, but those are 
> what we use the most so they're going to screw us, you can bank on it. 
>  Don't be a day late on your payment, and don't go a minute over your 
> quota, but You're more than welcome to still be our customer even 
> after you're punished for being our customer.  Your pocket book is 
> ours.  :)  How they sleep at night.  I do not know.

Here is a funny one.  Many ISPs supply their customers with a certain 
amount of space on their machines that they can use for personal web 
pages.  This uses more of of their resources than an equivalent page on 
the customers machine would (same bandwidth for accessing the pages, 
plus some to transfer the data to the page, disk space to store it, and 
CPU time to serve it), and if I understand the applicable portions of 
the DMCA properly they are potentially responsible for any copyright 
infringement in those pages but wouldn't be if the customer was hosting 
the page themselves simply getting bandwidth from the ISP.  Of course 
OTOH in a few places there are asymmetric transfer systems in place (a 
56k modem is 53 kbps one way and 33.6 k the other, systems which allow 
broadband speeds download via satellite but use a modem for upload, 
etc.) so they may have their configuration better optimized for a 
broadcast rather than a peer-to-peer model.

-- 
Theodore (Alex) Evans | 2B v ~2B = ?