Keep your fucking hands off my internet
I have a few very important questions. Would you be upset if your internet service provider:
- Read your emails?
- Monitored the sites you visited?
- Decided that you couldn't visit certain sites?
- Dictated what you could and could not download and from where?
Well, all of this could well happen. And the company that will bring it to you: AT&T.
Think it doesn't matter because you don't have an iPhone and don't use AT&T as your home internet service provider? Do you know who provides internet connectivity to your ISP? Or their ISP? AT&T controls a whole lotta pipe. Furthermore, they aren't the only ones considering the plan. In fact, Comcast has been teetering on the edge of non-neutraily for over a year. The pressure and money from Hollywood and media corporate interests is very real and very powerful.
The important thing here is having a corporate entity using blunt technological means (and accuracy is absolutely impossible here) to decide what you can and cannot do on the Internet is rife for collateral damage, serious privacy and civil liberty violations and completely anti-competitive. Although such practices would certainly be corporate suicide, such an event for a company of AT&T's size hurts everyone. In this case, shit would not only roll down to you, the consumer, but it would do so as an avalanche from all sides.
AT&T: Keep your fucking hands off my internet!
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There's a pretty lively discussion about rate-limiting and pricing models in the post-p2p net on NANOG for the last couple of weeks. Time Warner is going the opposite way of Comcast is experimenting with a usage-based pricing model for home internets. p2p has totally fucked the economic/capacity models for service providers and is overwhelming their infrastructures.
I won't be the least bit surprised if home internet access costs climb across the board in the next year.