<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

[IP] more on When Muni-WiFi Becomes Vehicle For Muni-Censorship



Begin forwarded message:

From: Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx>
Date: August 28, 2006 2:05:51 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on When Muni-WiFi Becomes Vehicle For Muni- Censorship 

Dave,




An ISP's viewpoint:

While blocking porn is nearly impossible to do well and legally
questionable under the First Amendment, blocking or at least mitigating P2P is an essential responsibility of any ISP -- public or private. Not 
only is the vast majority of P2P illegal (the amount of legal activity
being so small as to be negligible), but it is, quite simply, network
abuse. Due to the bandwidth hogging behavior which is built -- by design -- into P2P software, a relatively small number of P2Pers can render the 
network unusable for its intended purposes. Any responsible network
provider simply MUST mitigate P2P, both to prevent theft of intellectual 
property and to ensure the quality of service for legitimate users.

--Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET


Filtering bandwidth hogs is reasonable. That's already supported in
'fair share' routers and bridges, and doesn't require port or
protocol-based inference of what the user is doing.

Using too much bandwidth is a sufficient indicator of being a bandwidth
hog. Users can hog bandwidth using non-P2P protocols and applications.

Capacity limits based on protocol or port IS censorship.

Inferring hogging based on port/protocol rather than actual bandwidth
use is, well, both lazy and incorrect.

Joe




-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/