I realize that this is skirting the edge of operational, but I think it is notable that Verios security policy and incident response allowed for an entire ISP to be disconnected at their discretion. I suppose that any ISP can turn off a connection they deem a threat to the rest of their operations, but I think this incident can serve as an example of how ISP's can get dragged into political spats. It shows how Verio was manipulated by Dow to squelch critics, but also how their incident response was used to martyr the ISP they shut down. It is also worth noting how Verio allowed themselves to be PR collateral damage, taking one of their customers down in the process, when the conflict was between a group of artists and Dow. If only large providers were this responsive to spam. Cheers, ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 15:25:20 -0100 From: nettime's_roving_reporter <nettime@bbs.thing.net> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Subject: <nettime> NYT on Thing.net [ via <tbyfield@panix.com>] <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/arts/design/23ARTS.html?pagewanted=print&position=top> Cyberspace Artists Paint Themselves Into a Corner By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL In a 1950's horror movie the Thing was a creature that killed before it was killed. Now in a real-life drama playing on a computer screen near you, the Thing is an Internet service provider that is having trouble staying alive. Some might find this tale equally terrifying. The Thing provides Internet connections for dozens of New York artists and arts organizations, and its liberal attitude allows its clients to exhibit online works that other providers might immediately unplug. As a result the Thing is struggling to survive online. Its own Internet-connection provider is planning to disconnect the Thing over problems created by the Thing's clients. While it may live on, its crisis illustrates how difficult it can be for Internet artists to find a platform from which they can push the medium's boundaries. Wolfgang Staehle, the Thing's founder and executive director, said the high-bandwidth pipeline connecting the Thing to the Internet would be severed on Feb. 28 because its customers had repeatedly violated the pipeline provider's policies. While the exact abuses are not known, they probably involve the improper use of corporate trademarks and generating needless traffic on other sites. If Mr. Staehle is unable to establish a new pipeline, the 100 Web sites and 200 individual customers, mostly artists, that rely on the Thing for Internet service could lose their cyberspace homes. In a telephone interview from the Thing's office in Chelsea, Mr. Staehle (pronounced SHTAW-luh) said, "It's not fair that 300 of our clients will suffer from this and I might be out of business." The Thing's pipeline is currently supplied by Verio Inc. of Englewood, Colo., which declines to comment on its troubles with the Thing. Mr. Staehle said that he had not received official word from Verio, but that the company's lawyers told the Thing the service would be cut off because of the violations. For some digital artists, these are perilous times. With the Internet's rise have come increased concerns about everything from online privacy to digital piracy. Naturally artists are addressing these matters in Internet-based works. So an online project about copyright violations inevitably violates some copyrights, and a work that warns how a computer could be spying on you could very well be spying on you. Most Internet service providers yank such works offline whenever legal challenges are raised, so open-minded providers like the Thing become an important alternative. But as Alex Galloway, a New York artist, said, "There really are no true alternative Internet service providers because connectivity is still controlled by the telecommunication companies." Mr. Staehle has learned this the hard way. The project that overheated Verio's circuits was probably a Web site created by an online group of political activists called the Yes Men. The site, at dow-chemical.com, resembled Dow Chemical's real site, at dow.com. But the contents were phony news releases and speeches that ridiculed Dow officials for being more interested in profits than in making reparations for a lethal gas leak at a Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow) in Bhopal, India, in 1984. The hoax's supporters said it was a parody. But Dow's lawyers contacted Verio to complain that the site infringed on its trademarks, among other sins. Initially it seemed to be just another fracas over corporate logos and other forms of intellectual property on the Internet. What happened next stunned Mr. Staehle. The Yes Men project had been put online by RTMark.com, a politically active arts group that uses the Web as its base and gets its Internet service from the Thing. After Dow complained about the fake Web site, Mr. Staehle said, Verio alerted the Thing, where a technician said he was not authorized to act. Within hours Verio cut off access to RTMark.com, as well as to all the Thing's Internet customers. These included innocent victims like Artforum magazine and the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. Starting mid-evening on Dec. 4, the Thing was offline for 16 hours. Ted Byfield, a Thing board member who teaches a course at the Parsons School of Design on the social effects of technology, would not call Verio's action censorship. Instead he said, "They hit the panic button." He compared the temporary shutdown to a meat packer who recalls all his beef products after discovering a small batch of tainted hamburger. Mr. Staehle soon discovered that his virtual supermarket might be permanently closed, too. When he called Verio to ask why his entire network had been unplugged instead of the sole offending site, he said, a Verio lawyer told him that the Thing had violated its policies repeatedly and that its contract would be terminated. Verio had shut down part of the Thing once before. In 1999 the online toy retailer eToys.com asked a California court to stop an online arts group from using its longtime Web address etoy.com. The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a Thing client, staged a virtual protest by overloading the retailer's site with traffic during the holiday season. Verio blocked access to one of the Thing's computers until the protest site's owners agreed to take it offline. These two episodes may give Verio enough cause to bump the Thing from the Internet. If so Verio would appear to be a surprising censor. In January the company earned praise from Internet-rights supporters when it refused to grant a request by the Motion Picture Association of America to shut down a Web site containing DVD-copying software. Mr. Staehle said he had no knowledge of the Yes Men site. "I am not in the business of policing my clients," he said. "I am just a carrier." Although some Thing customers pursue a radical political agenda, most do not. Even RTMark.com was included in the Internet-art section of the 2000 Whitney Biennial exhibition. One might assume that museums and other cultural organizations could provide a safe haven for challenging works. But they are just as susceptible to legal threats and technical restrictions. For instance, in May the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York was forced to remove a surveillance-theme artwork from the Internet after its service provider said it violated its policies. Mr. Staehle said he was considering several plans that would keep the Thing alive. While he is confident that he will find another pipeline provider, he said, he is worried that customers will abandon the Thing during the transition, financially ruining it. The Thing is one of the oldest advocates of online culture. Mr. Staehle, who moved to New York from his native Germany in 1976, started the Thing in 1991 as an electronic bulletin board where artists could exchange ideas about how the new medium would affect the arts. The electronic forum continues at bbs.thing .net, where artists post projects and review works. Charles Guarino, Artforum's associate publisher, said that should the Thing vanish, "it would be a terrible loss." But he noted that the Thing's customers would simply find new, if less sympathetic, Internet service providers. Mr. Guarino said, "Everyone will still continue to exist, probably even the people who got them into all this trouble in the first place." He added, "Poor thing." # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, batz wrote:
I suppose that any ISP can turn off a connection they deem a threat to the rest of their operations, but I think this incident can serve as an example of how ISP's can get dragged into political spats. It shows how Verio was manipulated by Dow to squelch critics
Uhm. If an ISP has a policy catch-all clause of "We can disconnect customers at will, without reason" then you get what you deserve, responsibility for your actions. After a few big money costing lawsuits over this, I hope ISP's will return to their common-carrier status. I have no hopes that they will do so from a moral or ethical point of viwe, but let's hope they do so from a commercial point of view. If as an ISP, you don't want to get involved, it is very simple - Only take action based on court decisions (or in the case of the US, also DMCA requests and DMCA notice expirations) - If a third party wants any information/decision against a customer, make them indemnify you for any consequences their legal action will have on you, the ISP. This way, you're out of the loop, let the parties fight each other in court, and do whatever the judge tells you to do, without the risk of getting sued by one of the parties involved for your (in)actions. With policies like that, you can host things like say, http://xenu.net/ without getting sued by even such trigger happy people as Scientology O:) Paul
Uhm. If an ISP has a policy catch-all clause of "We can disconnect customers at will, without reason" then you get what you deserve, responsibility for your actions.
After a few big money costing lawsuits over this, I hope ISP's will return to their common-carrier status. I have no hopes that they will do so from a moral or ethical point of viwe, but let's hope they do so from a commercial point of view.
If as an ISP, you don't want to get involved, it is very simple - Only take action based on court decisions (or in the case of the US, also DMCA requests and DMCA notice expirations) - If a third party wants any information/decision against a customer, make them indemnify you for any consequences their legal action will have on you, the ISP.
This way, you're out of the loop, let the parties fight each other in court, and do whatever the judge tells you to do, without the risk of getting sued by one of the parties involved for your (in)actions.
With policies like that, you can host things like say, http://xenu.net/ without getting sued by even such trigger happy people as Scientology O:)
This has been a discussion item in the Swedish ISP business for quite some time (for a reason). The matter is actually a lot more complex than what you say above. First of all, in my opinion (and this seems to be pretty common), a company should be free to choose who they sign contracts and business deals with. In principle, if I believe that a potential customer will end up in financial trouble, if I believe that having him as a client will harm other business relations (out of competitive claims etc) or similar issues, I should be in my full right to deny signing a contract. At the same time, I as an ISP do not want to categorically based on content, ethics, morals etc deny customers or disconnect customers. Especially for content that is judged illegal. If content is illegal that is up to the courts and police to judge and take action on. Now, getting these two claims to work together is the tricky balance. - kurtis -
On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Kurt Erik Lindqvist wrote:
This has been a discussion item in the Swedish ISP business for quite some time (for a reason). The matter is actually a lot more complex than what you say above.
How ironic, would that be because of Flashback magazine? :) For those who do not know, Flashback is a Swedish e-zine, that had about a million subscribers. It was also one of the first "free isps" before that concept took off commercially, so it allowed people free homepages. At some point some political person had a problem with various rightwing websites hosted on Flashback. Things were even brought into court, where the judge ruled that the material published by those rightwing websites was perhaps not very nice, but it wasn't illegal, so there was nothing the courts could or should do about it. The ISP of Flashback then had to disconnect them because otherwise the ISP itself would get disconnected by UUnet. UUnet also stated that any Swedisch ISP connecting Flashback would itself be disconnected. Flashback then temporarily had to move its hosting to outside Sweden (we did their hosting, ironically with UUnet as our upstream for half of the time) for six months, before it managed to get a local connection again. In short, UUnet corporate policy stood above Swedisch law........ This is exactly why ISP's should not be allowed to have these "we will disconnect you at our sole discretion" clauses. It makes them stand above the law, and the defense of "you can go to another ISP" is false, because you cannot. Most, if not every ISP has these clauses, and those who don't probably buy transit from those who do. The enduser has no choice. He is simply not protected by law. Welcome to the Corporate Republic.
First of all, in my opinion (and this seems to be pretty common), a company should be free to choose who they sign contracts and business deals with.
Only within reason. You cannot excludes based on various reasons, such as religion, believes, race, sex, etc. Most countries have laws against such discrimination. The important thing is to have openly published, clear and non-discriminatory reasons for canceling/denying a contract. As an ISP, you shouldn't discriminate at all, if you ever want to be soon as a common carrier, which is what you want, unless you want to start a lawfirm instead of an ISP business.
In principle, if I believe that a potential customer will end up in financial trouble,
The above is unrelated to wanting to have some security for payment. Your financial security should be based on generic rules applying to all your customers.
if I believe that having him as a client will harm other business relations (out of competitive claims etc) or similar issues, I should be in my full right to deny signing a contract.
You should not! You will open yourself to threats from all your customers. Your big customers will end up deciding your company's policy. This is BAD! Canceling a customer that has done nothing wrong, is just ethically and morally wrong. You might as well condone the Great Firewall of China. As a simple example, say you are hosting www.shell.se, and Greenpeace asks you for hosting. You agree, and then Shell (by far a much bigger and profitable customer for you) tells you it will go elsewhere if you do not cancel your hosting agreement with Greenpeace. Now, your company's reason is VERY valid, it is in the company's financial interest to cancel Greenpeace. And since Greenpeace has done nothing wrong, you can only cancel them based on "in sole discretion". I do not believe any ISP should be able to make the above decision. In fact, I would say they should be protected against this. Being a common carrier, (or as we do, by not having a "in our sole discretion" clause), you will never have to face this decision. You can tell Shell that their request simple cannot be honoured, even though you would prefer to keep them rather then Greenpeace. It might seem as a bitter pill, Shell would probably still go elsewhere, but at least you don't open Pandora's Box. Imagine that for every customer you have to check whether it is a risk to losing a bigger customer.
At the same time, I as an ISP do not want to categorically based on content, ethics, morals etc deny customers or disconnect customers. Especially for content that is judged illegal.
As you stated, I doubt it is illegal to judge on content, since ISP's have no offcial common carrier status in Sweden. So, it is legal for you to discriminate, as long as you don't violate general law (eg racism). I'm sure it is legal for you to say you don't accept customers that are for instance, environmentalists, even when you admit that it would be based on hosting oil companies.
If content is illegal that is up to the courts and police to judge and take action on.
If you truly believe that, you should incorporate that in the company policy, thereby giving up the right to cancel in your sole discretion, including perhaps giving up some of your biggest customers. You can't have the cake and eat it too.
Now, getting these two claims to work together is the tricky balance.
You cannot. You want to discriminate based on your company's interest first, and your customers' rights second. By doing so, you are not better then those big bullying customers of yours yourself. You can't grab the best of both worlds, and deny the customers you don't like, and keep the ones you like, and then say you don't want to get involved in conflicts. Either you universally accept customers based on public, generic conditions, or you open up your company for legal disputes. As a side note: This is exactly what happened with us and Priority Telecom. The potential cost of Scientology's legal bill was far more then what they would possibly earn from having us as a customer. So our contract was terminated (well, officially it was "nothing to do with Scientology" and "without any reason in our sole discretion"). Is that the "freedom" you want to have as an ISP? Is that how you want to make your money? I hope not. We at least didn't. We got ourselves different and better connectivity, moving upwards in the ISP foodchain to protect us further from these kind of dependancies. Yes, we lost money on our customer, and it will take years of them hosting their business with us to even break even. But I strongly feel it is my responsibility as an ISP to protect the freedom of speech of my customrs against bullies, and to put these issues back where they belong: Between the parties involved in court. If only one ISP would remove the catch-all phrase for every time I tried to explain this, the problem would have practically disappeared by now :( Paul -- God devised pigeons as a means of punishment for man. Probably after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha he wanted to make sure that people would never again feel comfortable enough in a city to repeat the sins committed there, and he created the pigeons as a means to make the city dwellers' lives more miserable, as a constant reminder of their past sins.
This has been a discussion item in the Swedish ISP business for quite some time (for a reason). The matter is actually a lot more complex than what you say above.
How ironic, would that be because of Flashback magazine? :)
To some extent, but not recently. Mostly due to child-porn, TV decoder piracy and a number of other issues.
For those who do not know, Flashback is a Swedish e-zine, that had about a million subscribers. It was also one of the first "free isps" before that concept took off commercially, so it allowed people free homepages. At some point some political person had a problem with various rightwing websites hosted on Flashback. Things were even brought into court, where the judge ruled that the material published by those rightwing websites was perhaps not very nice, but it wasn't illegal, so there was nothing the courts could or should do about it. The ISP of Flashback then had to disconnect them because otherwise the ISP itself would get disconnected by UUnet. UUnet also stated that any Swedisch ISP connecting Flashback would itself be disconnected. Flashback then temporarily had to move its hosting to outside Sweden (we did their hosting, ironically with UUnet as our upstream for half of the time) for six months, before it managed to get a local connection again.
In short, UUnet corporate policy stood above Swedisch law........
This is exactly why ISP's should not be allowed to have these "we will disconnect you at our sole discretion" clauses. It makes them stand above the law, and the defense of "you can go to another ISP" is false, because you cannot. Most, if not every ISP has these clauses, and those who don't probably buy transit from those who do. The enduser has no choice. He is simply not protected by law. Welcome to the Corporate Republic.
Just for the record, your story above is far from complete and not true on all accounts. It is also a quite simplified version of what happened. Summary is that no matter what the ISPs (this is not UUnet alone, actually pretty much all ISPs denied service, even those that where not behind UUnet. I am not sure if the UUnet threat story is true. This is quite some time ago) would have done or said they would have got shot down by public opinion. There was quite a lot of press articles on how horrible it was that these neo-nazi sites (which is what they where) was allowed to be on the Internet without action from the providers. This is a discussion you as ISP simply can't win.
First of all, in my opinion (and this seems to be pretty common), a company should be free to choose who they sign contracts and business deals with.
Only within reason. You cannot excludes based on various reasons, such as religion, believes, race, sex, etc. Most countries have laws against such discrimination.
Correct, no objection.
The important thing is to have openly published, clear and non-discriminatory reasons for canceling/denying a contract. As an ISP, you shouldn't discriminate at all, if you ever want to be soon as a common carrier, which is what you want, unless you want to start a lawfirm instead of an ISP business.
Well, I can also see clear business reasons as to why I would deny a client. If I had Coca-Cola as a customer and Pepsi-cola wanted to buy a service, but Cola then threatens to leave, I should be in my full right to deny Pepsi service.
if I believe that having him as a client will harm other business relations (out of competitive claims etc) or similar issues, I should be in my full right to deny signing a contract.
You should not! You will open yourself to threats from all your customers. Your big customers will end up deciding your company's policy. This is BAD!
Well, if that is where the money flows in from, it's not that bad.
As a simple example, say you are hosting www.shell.se, and Greenpeace asks you for hosting. You agree, and then Shell (by far a much bigger and profitable customer for you) tells you it will go elsewhere if you do not cancel your hosting agreement with Greenpeace. Now, your company's reason is VERY valid, it is in the company's financial interest to cancel Greenpeace. And since Greenpeace has done nothing wrong, you can only cancel them based on "in sole discretion".
Yes? See my example above. I see no conflict in this. It's called a free market.
At the same time, I as an ISP do not want to categorically based on content, ethics, morals etc deny customers or disconnect customers. Especially for content that is judged illegal.
As you stated, I doubt it is illegal to judge on content, since ISP's have no offcial common carrier status in Sweden. So, it is legal for you to discriminate, as long as you don't violate general law (eg racism). I'm sure it is legal for you to say you don't accept customers that are for instance, environmentalists, even when you admit that it would be based on hosting oil companies.
The problem comes when you for example enter into content. If I as an ISP removes content based on the assumption it's illegal (let's take TV decoder information as example), I will do the role of the police and courts. I have made the judgement. This in my view requires a request from the police rather than doing this as you go buy. This will otherwise open the pandoras box you describe, where you would have to judge what is illegal political content, child porn, etc.
If content is illegal that is up to the courts and police to judge and take action on.
If you truly believe that, you should incorporate that in the company policy, thereby giving up the right to cancel in your sole discretion, including perhaps giving up some of your biggest customers. You can't have the cake and eat it too.
Notice the difference between judging content and choosing connectivity customers. - kurtis -
On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Kurt Erik Lindqvist wrote:
Just for the record, your story above is far from complete and not true on all accounts. It is also a quite simplified version of what happened.
Perhaps Zenon (Whom I cc:ed just because he knows the details) can shed some more light on this.
have got shot down by public opinion. There was quite a lot of press articles on how horrible it was that these neo-nazi sites (which is what they where) was allowed to be on the Internet without action from the providers.
A court deemed it nasty but legal. Whom are the ISP's to go against a court decision?
This is a discussion you as ISP simply can't win.
I shouldn't be *in* the discussion as an ISP.
Well, I can also see clear business reasons as to why I would deny a client. If I had Coca-Cola as a customer and Pepsi-cola wanted to buy a service, but Cola then threatens to leave, I should be in my full right to deny Pepsi service.
Well, if that is where the money flows in from, it's not that bad.
It is also where the lawsuits flow from. If you really are just interested in the money, then be honest and also say that you don't give a cent about your small customers, nor their freedom or civil rights (which is what you and all other ISP's are forcing them to sign away)
Yes? See my example above. I see no conflict in this. It's called a free market.
It is *not* a free market. Imagine AOL blocking Greenpeace. Is this still normal, and ethically and morally okay, because that earns AOL some extra Shell bucks. Monetairy interests without any scupulous, which is what you claim, is exact the end of free market, and the reigh of the Corporate company.
The problem comes when you for example enter into content.
That is *exactly* why we do not enter into content. We ask the parties to go to court and present us with a ruling. I am not a court, ruler, dictator, policeman, lawyer nor executioner. I am an ISP.
If I as an ISP removes content based on the assumption it's illegal (let's take TV decoder information as example), I will do the role of the police and courts. I have made the judgement. This in my view requires a request from the police rather than doing this as you go buy.
Not the police, the courts. Yes, you should tell Astra to get a court ruling against your customer. (Or if you would be a US company, ask for a formal DMCA notice, and then ask for the eventual court ruling. If there will be no legal action, as per DMCA, you reinstate the content, which by then has gained immunity from DMCA notices from that party.
This will otherwise open the pandoras box you describe, where you would have to judge what is illegal political content, child porn, etc.
In our 7 years of existence, we have never had to "rule" ourselves. And we do host some high profile website, such as the ones I've mentioned before, Xenu.net and FlashBack magazine.
Notice the difference between judging content and choosing connectivity customers.
There is no difference. And if there is, the difference is only judged by you. You are not a court. You can, and should not, rule. Paul -- God devised pigeons as a means of punishment for man. Probably after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha he wanted to make sure that people would never again feel comfortable enough in a city to repeat the sins committed there, and he created the pigeons as a means to make the city dwellers' lives more miserable, as a constant reminder of their past sins.
Just for the record, your story above is far from complete and not true on all accounts. It is also a quite simplified version of what happened.
Perhaps Zenon (Whom I cc:ed just because he knows the details) can shed some more light on this.
Well, I was (still is) a member of the Swedish Operator Forum, and I was part of making the decision on behalf of KPNQwest. I think I know what happened as well as anyone else does. But this is off-topic for this list.
have got shot down by public opinion. There was quite a lot of press articles on how horrible it was that these neo-nazi sites (which is what they where) was allowed to be on the Internet without action from the providers.
A court deemed it nasty but legal. Whom are the ISP's to go against a court decision?
The question was not if the content was "nasty" or not. The question was that there was a web-site that urged people to take to violence to a politician that had tried to work against the neo-nazis. There where several court cases (and I think it's still being discussed) that all came to different conclusions. This I don't know the details of. But to the point, just because a site is legal, do I need to host it? I think not. What if all customers then decide to leave? I would be forced into bankruptcy.
Well, I can also see clear business reasons as to why I would deny a client. If I had Coca-Cola as a customer and Pepsi-cola wanted to buy a service, but Cola then threatens to leave, I should be in my full right to deny Pepsi service.
Well, if that is where the money flows in from, it's not that bad.
It is also where the lawsuits flow from. If you really are just interested in the money, then be honest and also say that you don't give a cent about your small customers, nor their freedom or civil rights (which is what you and all other ISP's are forcing them to sign away)
If a company don't generate money they won't be around to protect freedom and civil acts. Also, most companies are actually only in it for the money, and the small customers own shares in the company and expects them to earn as much money as possible. Few ISPs are driven out of devotion and good faith.
Yes? See my example above. I see no conflict in this. It's called a free market.
It is *not* a free market. Imagine AOL blocking Greenpeace. Is this still normal, and ethically and morally okay, because that earns AOL some extra Shell bucks. Monetairy interests without any scupulous, which is what you claim, is exact the end of free market, and the reigh of the Corporate company.
This is a political statement and actually that is where this discussion is going. I suggest we move this off-list if we are to continue.
This will otherwise open the pandoras box you describe, where you would have to judge what is illegal political content, child porn, etc.
In our 7 years of existence, we have never had to "rule" ourselves. And we do host some high profile website, such as the ones I've mentioned before, Xenu.net and FlashBack magazine.
Notice that you are located in a country with a very different base of ethics and a much more liberal view on most things compared to the Nordics. The web-sites at Flashback that was "nasty" would most likely have been illegal in Germany and a subject for the Constitutional court in Karlsruhe. I have worked in the Nordics, Netherlands and Germany. Public opinion, law and traditions vary a lot. This will also have influence on actions taken. - kurtis -
On 2003-01-09-13:13:23, batz <batsy@vapour.net> wrote:
[...] I suppose that any ISP can turn off a connection they deem a threat to the rest of their operations, but I think this incident can serve as an example of how ISP's can get dragged into political spats. It shows how Verio was manipulated by Dow to squelch critics, but also how their incident response was used to martyr the ISP they shut down.
thing.net is located at 601 West 26th Street in New York City, a building split about evenly between carrier facilities and commercial office space. Around the time their squabbles with Verio took place, they were approached by building neighbors aware of their struggles, offering backup connectivity on favorable terms. In reading this and other articles, it seems to me they're more interested in complaining to the media about so-called impiety on Verio's part, than acquiring alternate connectivity and retaining their subscriber base. Of course, I could be off-base, in which case I encourage others privy to more details of the situation to speak up. Regards, -a
This is only marginally on topic, but I know Ted Byfield (quoted as a Thing.net board member in the NYT) from elsewhere so I forwarded Adam's post to him for comment. Followups to nanog-offtopic please, I won't continue the thread here. Ted's reply is below. -- Joseph F. Noonan Rigaku/MSC Inc. jfn@msc.com ----- Forwarded //Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 10:43:44 -0500 //From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com> //To: nanog@merit.edu //Subject: Re: NYT on Thing.net (fwd) hi, nanogers -- adam, yeah, as a matter of fact, you are off-base. for starters, you seem to assume that getting alternate connectivity and talking with journalists (or 'complaining to the media,' as you so generously put it) are mutually exclusive. they aren't, of course. and, once upon a time, 601 w 26th may have been split evenly between carriers and offices, but that's hardly the case now: there are rooms half the size of a football field littered with racks and channel ditched by carriers that went bust. they were banging on thing.net's door with all kinds of kewl offers; luckily, thing.net said no. there are a lot of issues bearing on how thing.net is handling this issue which i'm not at liberty to speak about in public. suffice it to say that the people who run thing.net aren't stupid or thoughtless, so chances are that cursory readings of newspaper articles probably aren't the best basis for estimating what thing.net is or isn't doing or why. cheers, t - (on thing.net's board)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 14:01:38 -0500 From: Adam Rothschild <asr@asr.org> To: batz <batsy@vapour.net> Subject: Re: NYT on Thing.net <...> thing.net is located at 601 West 26th Street in New York City, a building split about evenly between carrier facilities and commercial office space.
Around the time their squabbles with Verio took place, they were approached by building neighbors aware of their struggles, offering backup connectivity on favorable terms.
In reading this and other articles, it seems to me they're more interested in complaining to the media about so-called impiety on Verio's part, than acquiring alternate connectivity and retaining their subscriber base.
Of course, I could be off-base, in which case I encourage others privy to more details of the situation to speak up.
Regards, -a
----- Backwarded
participants (5)
-
Adam Rothschild -
batz -
J.F. Noonan -
Kurt Erik Lindqvist -
Paul Wouters