odog
Cable Centric Vendor Biased
Premium
join:2001-08-05
Norcross, GA
clubs:
 ·Metrocast Communic..
·Comcast
 ·Vonage
| reply to jester121
Re: Any you thought snarfing phone calls were it...
said by jester121  :But most of the companies that actually ARE wholesale customers of AT&T WOULD welcome this -- less bandwidth to purchase from AT&T (thanks to thwarting pirate bandwidth hogs) = a few more months in business. Why do you think they would defect en masse? Because your customers would defect from you. If I was a customer of an ISP, and my ISP only used AT&T for their internet connection my customers would get mad at me for not being able to use P2P. Also if you are a business level customer you buy raw, naked internet, with no restrictions. |
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jester121
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL
·ViaTalk
| said by odog :Because your customers would defect from you. If I was a customer of an ISP, and my ISP only used AT&T for their internet connection my customers would get mad at me for not being able to use P2P. Also if you are a business level customer you buy raw, naked internet, with no restrictions. Plenty of small businesses wouldn't mind AT&T filtering potentially illegal traffic from their network; it saves them some expense in installing filter/block software.
It all comes down to which direction the market takes. I'd say the vast majority of customers are going to shop price and speed, and if they find out afterwards that P2P doesn't work, they'll get over it. |
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DivineDark
join:2001-08-30
Oklahoma City, OK
clubs:
| said by jester121 :said by odog :Because your customers would defect from you. If I was a customer of an ISP, and my ISP only used AT&T for their internet connection my customers would get mad at me for not being able to use P2P. Also if you are a business level customer you buy raw, naked internet, with no restrictions. Plenty of small businesses wouldn't mind AT&T filtering potentially illegal traffic from their network; it saves them some expense in installing filter/block software. It all comes down to which direction the market takes. I'd say the vast majority of customers are going to shop price and speed, and if they find out afterwards that P2P doesn't work, they'll get over it. So what liability does this give the Telcos since they want to play nanny? What if child porn slips through or even worse a unreleased copy of X-Men? |
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anonymouse5
@rr.com
| Yep, sacrificing common carrier status would be stupid
If AT&T or any of the other "big stupids" decides to start filtering their traffic for content:
(1) it won't work. There's no way to identify all "unwanted" traffic, since it can simply be encrypted. If they required that all traffic whatsoever had a certificate approved by some central authority (the only way it could actually work), they'd have every business with a VPN up in arms -- and the certificates would be copied within seconds.
(2) More significantly, it would sacrifice the common carrier status which Internet providers enjoy. Because Internet providers agree to carry all traffic on an equal basis, not discriminating, they are not liable for its contents under the "common carrier" doctrine. If they start discriminating they become liable. For *all* of it. They'd be bankrupt quite promptly, and executives would be in prison. This is a can of worms which AT&T's lawyers will tell them *not* to open.
Now, they can probably avoid sacrificing common carrier status if they only filter a short blacklist of material "opportunistically", by arguing that it's like the post office refusing to carry parcels which start emitting smoke.  But obviously such a filter would be totally worthless and would exist only as an advertising-to-the-RIAA-and-MPAA gimmick. |
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