On 28 Apr 2005, at 00:55, Owen DeLong wrote:
Who are you to decide that there is no damage to blocking residential customers?
The customer makes the decision when they subscribe to a service whether or not filtered service will meet their needs. Who are you to decide that unfiltered service is required to meet the needs of all customers?
I never said they did. I simply said ISPs shouldn't decide this for their customers, as some do.
Why should an ISP decide what a residential customer can or can't do with their internet connection.
The service provider should be able to decide what services they wish to offer. If a provider of any service chooses to differentiate services based on utility and the customer is made aware of these characteristics, how is this in anyway unfair? If your objection is that, in single provider markets, it may not be financially viable to obtain your desire service level i.e. the local cable provider does not offer unfiltered connectivity and there are no other residential high bandwidth options available then I suggest you encourage diversity in the market place.
I do encourage diversity in the market place. However, that doesn't necessarily change the current reality.
You are not entitled to unfiltered internet connectivity. If you want to be entitled to unfiltered internet connectivity then petition your local government to make transit a privatized utility with all the government oversight and bureaucracy that entails.
In some locations, that is becoming the case. I'm not sure that's necessarily such a bad idea. I'd rather encourage providers to do the right thing without the extra overhead, however. Owen
--- James Baldwin hkp://pgp.mit.edu/jbaldwin@antinode.net "Syntatic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."
-- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.