On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
I'm curious what would happen if an ISP tried blocking P2P apps under that section, however. Sure, a lot of it's illegal, but not all of it. Could "gross overuse of bandwidth" be considered a threat to the network's reliability, or would the statement of minimum capacity required in Sec 104(b)(1)(A) mean the ISP can't complain about how the customer uses their bandwidth? The courts will have fun with that one.
Cable providers in particular will have a very big problem with that interpretation. While the asymmetry of cable downstream/upstream traffic levels is good (insofar that the structure of radio channels more or less requires it), cable providers have been massively overbooking their downstream bandwidth lately. $CableVendor in my market now pushes its "6Mb/s" service quite hard in advertising. I have written proof in hand from its "Abuse Department" that it will not honor its downstream rate for any sustained amount of time -- though none of its ToU, AUP, nor this document states what its criteria are for service interruption under this guise. Funny, that: $CableVendor is deaf to spam and DDoS complaints, but it certainly sits up and listens closely when someone has a reason to make use of its consumer offering at full capacity. (And I got this letter at a time when $CableVendor's maximum downstream rate was a mere 1.5Mb/s.) In any case, the letter I received would make an interesting litmus test to your theory about guaranteed service speeds.
Preempting state prohibitions on public carriers is interesting -- hopefully we'll see a lot of those emerge in states (like mine) that currently ban them.
This sort of preemption is becoming somewhat commonplace and is an attempt by legislators to pacify telecom operators doing local business in multiple states (as otherwise the Constitution's Amendment 10 would relegate near total power back to the states -- where it should be IMHO ;). There was a similar clause in [YOU-]CAN-SPAM, because the DMA wanted it. But then, the DMA got a lot of wishes granted in that piece-of-cr^Wlaw. -- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>