The gene pool needed some chlorine anyhow, but this is a creative approach. :)
But seriously - would this be significantly different than the model
Valdis said: that
many ISPs already use, where "consumer" connections get port 25 blocked, no servers allowed, etc, and "business grade" skip those restrictions? Or are you saying that ISPs should go *further* in blocking stuff, and use the resulting support savings to lower the consumer grade price point?
Only big stumbling block is what percent of customers will be willing to skip file-sharing networks and online games that use oddball ports? Any ideas there?
Better than the typical "block outbound 25" filtering we do now. In fact, in a perfect world ISPs would offer residential customers "reduced experience" versions of castration that decrease the cost along with decreasing what you have access to. At the bottom level it would be essentially a thin client running a terminal service (or an emulated thin client using a web browser) with all applications "in the cloud" and nothing sitting on the home PC; mid-level would be web plus common email clients and chat/IM; high level adds popular apps like Skype, P2P, games, etc. I think that a fairly large percentage of homes that only want access to online content and email would be very happy with the bottom tiers. Many would probably like the cloud approach where all of the crazy updating, rebooting, etc. is taken out of the hands of the consumer. WebTV, meet the 21st century.... :) Marc