In a message written on Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:22:11PM -0600, Jack Bates wrote:
Not true. An ISP can choose to allow NAT and wireless or not allow it. This is the ISPs choice. The law is designed to protect the ISPs rights from existing technology so that the ISP can bill appropriately according to what service is being used. This does not mean that every ISP will not allow NAT.
I find this argument interesting, because a lot of people seem to share your feeling that the ISP can, in the terms of service, allow or disallow specific uses. I submit at this point in time they can, but it would be amazingly stupid for them to do that. As much as ISP's don't want it admit it an internet connection is being treated more and more like a utility. Drop into that mix that many consumers who can get DSL or Cable Modems only have a single ISP to buy from and it looks even more like a utility. Now, does the electric company tell you what you can and can't plug in? Do they tell you that you can only use 120v devices, or 220v devices? No, they simply bill you for what you use. Does the water company tell you that you can't drink the water? Share it with a stranger that stops by? Bill you based on how many sinks and showers you have? No, they simply bill you for what you use. Does the phone company tell you how many phones you can have? Do they prevent you from using a cordless phone, or loaning that cordless phone to your neighbor? No, they simply bill you for what you use. The last one is an interesting case. The phone company used to lease you the phones (and you didn't have a choice). They kept tally of every connection, required you to use them to run all the wires. They screamed for years that if the system was run any other way it would all fall apart. Well, the people revolted, broke up AT&T, and put in a pile of government regulation to allow people to plug up (at least from a phone point of view) pretty much anything. If ISP's keep imposing these overly restrictive terms of service eventually the people will revolt. The government will come in and make a huge mess of the industry, but probably "fix" things from the consumer point of view. ISP's would be wise to look at what the other utilities do, and make their service be the dropping off of an Ethernet port on a billing device (eg, meter) and simply bill per bit. In the end, I think users would be more happy (plug up whatever you want, however you want, we don't care!), and I think the ISP's would make more money. First, more people would plug up more stuff. Second, they would make revenue off things they don't today. They outlaw servers because they can't make money on them with $49.95 a month pricing. Well, if you bill by the bit the guy who runs a server can pay $50 in usage charges. He has his server, the ISP has the money to scale their network to support it. We call this a win-win situation. Third, they could lower the entry point price for people with low needs. $25 could get you DSL with 1G a month for grandma and her e-mail, while $100 could get you DSL with 8G a month for a gamer. The grandma who won't pay $50 today might pay $25. So, while the ISP's may not be doing anything illegal, and in fact may be having success in passing laws to make what they seem to want to do even easier, they are being extremely short sighted and stupid. They may get a couple of good years out of this run, but eventually the people will be fed up, and fed up people get the government involved, and the government will fix it in it's usual bull-in-a-china-shop way, which will be very bad for the ISP, and hopefully only slightly bad for the consumer. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org