Modest proposal for Comcast's net-filtering
Will sez, "I just posted my semi-serious vision of the worst-case result of Comcast's Bittorrent/Lotus Notes filtering policy in the form of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal."
Phase two hinges on the rollout of a new Comcast toolbar. In addition to tracking our users' web surfing habits and favorite pornographic sites, this toolbar also alerts customers before they download any file larger than 75KB. A helpful pop-up bearing the question “Are you sure you really meant to do that?” appears, and if the user does the right thing, and opts out of his bandwidth-intensive download, he’ll be greeted by a clever multimedia ad unit for a free webcam. The Happy Bandwidth Initiative team will be using the webcams to track user eye movements, allowing our research department to identify the content that users enjoy most, so that we can charge them a modest premium to access these high-traffic pages. The toolbar will be a mandatory download for all of our customers.Link (Thanks, Will!)
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What ISPs need to implement is a simple system for tapering bandwidth, based only on number of bits transferred in a given time period.
An ISP / Broadband provider has a fixed total bandwidth which they divvy out amongst the customers - most people the net for less than 30 minutes a day, and are clicking a link every few minutes.
The `problem' is that a fraction of people really do try to download at full bandwidth 24/7 with automated tools, which the infrastructure can't support.
so: Make a system with a rolling time window in which the first 5Gb downloads at full speed, then the next 2.5Gb at half speed, then the next 1.25Gb at quarter, etc. so you run into a soft barrier and can never exceed 10GB per week or whatever is actually sustainable for them as a service provider, rather than you download 100GB at full whack and then get your service abruptly terminated.
You can implement that system with a couple of kilobytes of data per customer, eg. downloaded bits/hour over the last month. As a customer, you can't work round it.
The problem with filtering based on protocol is a) it's more technically involved, so you'll need specialist hardware to do it fast enough, and b) it will make an incentive to for the protocols you target to disguise themselves, so c) your investment in filtering technology risks being obsoleted, and d) you'll be in a worse position compared to a competitor who opted for a simple rationing scheme, and invested the extra cash in providing more capacity with cheaper hardware.
Wildfire: You know what? I'd sign up for that system. Assuming that my ISP told me LOUD AND CLEAR in the contract.
If you sign a contract, saying that I can have all the bananas I can take if I come to your house to get it, you'd better believe I'll be there with a forklift. And if you don't expect that, don't offer unlimited contracts.
It's simple: if it's not profitable to offer unlimited anything, don't. Write an "economically sustainable" contract. But if you write a bad contract, don't complain to me about it.
To be fair, Comcast seems to only be limiting *uploads* not *downloads*. I download torrents all the time at full speed. I get crazy file transfer times through services like Steam and Direct2Drive.
It's only uploads that knock me out. Transferring files to my website is relatively slow and I can never seed any torrent, which is kind of a bummer.
Still, I've always seen it as paying for an end-user service, which I get and enjoy, not a file-serving service, which I also get and enjoy but I do *that* through a seperate company. I'm sure Boing Boing isn't hosted on Xeni's personal computer at home through her DSL/cable connection. Even if she had the server hardware, no home connection is going to offer that kind of crazy bandwidth for that kind of price and I'm not sure why anyone expects that it should.
Katre, if Comcast and other ISPs had been upfront and honest about this from the beginning, I think 90% of the heart ache about this would never have happened.
Keeping secrets about what levels cause things to happen, and not giving the tools that customers need to monitor themselves (and believe me, they already have the tools, they just do not want to share them) is an accident that keeps happening. They've finally wised up and no longer offer unlimited Internet, just faster Internet. That is one step out of many that has to happen.
Keeping their vendor list secret when said vendors are already blabbing Comcast's name all over the place is just one small part of their total cluelessness.
Okay... try 2 for this comment.
I think that while the tool bar thing was a joke, it might not be far from something comcrap would try to pull. I remember when I first started with then years ago, they told me I couldn't get internet access without their software on my machine. I laughed at them, and never once let any of their so-called techs get near my computer equipment. Not even to plug in the network cable.
Still, considering all the slimy crap their pulling, doing a tool bar like this isn't too far fetched. Unfortunately.
Sheesh, I never thought I'd be wishing Verizon would cut through the deal that Comcrap forced on my neighborhood and put up FIOS...