And then there were two. That, at least, is the stark prospect facing us in the area of broadband communications, with the Supreme Court’s decision in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services setting the stage for just two companies—the local cable monopoly and the incumbent telephone giant—to control the “last-mile” broadband connections to our homes and businesses.… return to article
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Reader Comments (5)Page 1 of 1 pagesWhy would an ISP be able and/or permitted to restrict data flow any more than it can restrict telephone speech content?
Posted by Lefty on Jul 7, 2005 at 7:56 PM Why would they not?
All ISP’s gain a significant amount of their income from ecommerce webhosting customers. It would be in the ISP’s best interest to funnel access users (aka dial-up, broadband) to their webhosting customers.
This gives ISP’s the leverage to go get more income producing webhosting customers.
As an extreme example, what do you think would happen if eBuy got hooked up to ... Cablecast… and Cablecast ‘slowed’ the connections from other ISP’s to eBuy. Then they did a mass advertisement stating that ‘you could have instant eBuy access thru Cablecast!’ In a short time, most serious eBuy customers would switch to Cablecast, I have no doubt.
Proving that this ‘slowing’ of a connection is just about impossible to prove. USWorst, did a mass advertisement for lowcost DSL back in the beginning of the DLS days. They sold DSL connections hand over fist, but they couldn’t deliver. Why? Because they sold a product before buying the equipment! Were they flooding the market with a product at lower cost then the competitors or did they just ‘forget to build the infrastructure’?
When it comes time for streaming big stuff like movies… it is in an ISP’s interest to keep this traffic within their network. Anything originating from outside their network costs money, and it will probably be expensive. The solution for this is just to not purchase enough bandwidth to ‘the other guy’ (as it seems).
Filtering or ‘blocking access’ to certain subnets of the internet is EXTREMELY easy, and impossible to prove that it was intentional.
Another option is e-mail. There are a few spam solutions out that aren’t very compatible. Whose to say that BudTel won’t go with the ‘latest Microsnot’ solution that ‘just happens’ to only work with Outlook clients and MSExchange server?
Back in the early days, AOL email just wasn’t compatible with the Internet. How many people put off getting true internet access because of this? I know I had an AOL account for several years just so that I could get around this.
Note that these are ‘business decisions’, not politically motivated decisions.
Bill
Posted by idbill on Jul 8, 2005 at 6:52 PM Better burn those files to CD now, get a short wave, and in case of electo-magnetic warfare, learn to sing and tell stories.
Posted by paranoid on Jul 9, 2005 at 7:35 PM Bill,
I still don’t understand HOW an ISP can control the content an internet user has access to. Are you saying that when I do a Google search and I get a hit I’m interested in, and I get a page that says “The Page Cannot be Found” that my ISP may be blocking that page?
Posted by Lefty on Jul 14, 2005 at 1:32 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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