On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, todd glassey wrote:
Vadim - the instant someone sues a Provider for sexual harassment from their spam epidemic you will start to see things change. The reason that No-Sane provider will block these ports or services is because they have been listening to their Network Admins too long,
We were talking about P2P, not spam. P2P participants _want_ to talk to each other, unlike spammer and his victims. ISPs already agressively fight spammers by termninating their service completely - no port blocking or lawsuits are needed. Blocking ports is not going to prevent communication between parties which wish to communicate. And carriage of bits is about an order of magintude bigger economically than the whole entertaintment industry. RIAA already was stupid enough to make enemies of telcos (with that Verizon lawsut). The tech industry was bending themselves over to court Hollywood because the common wisdom was that the content is going to be what people will pay for. Wrong. Content-based dotcoms died, and people still pay for Internet connectivity, in ever-increasing numbers. And spend more and more time in front of computers instead of TVs. Simply because live people on the other end of the wire are infinitely more interesting than the prechewed corporate crud called "content". So I think we'll see some fireworks on the legal front, but the outcome is already clear - unfiltered connectivity is what consumers wish to pay for, not the sanitized disneys. --vadim