Some of you might be wondering why "a little over a dozen" people being booted from their ISP is newsworthy. This is figuratively the beginning of a very, very slippery slope.
It is a very bad precedent to cut people off a needed service to live today, and it needs to be stopped immediately.
The problem is ISPs and content providers, or both, are prioritizing their needs over other industries.
Say someone does pirate something, and the cost of that is a few hundred or even thousands of dollars that they wouldn't have bought anyways in most cases or couldn't afford. Well they also use the internet to purchase products, pay bills, and the internet is part of daily life now. Cutting someone off from the network utility because of even large amounts of digital goods being pirated is the wrong approach as it has collateral damage to other products/industries, survival of the person and possibly their family and more.
Should the person pay a fine? Yes. Should they lose their internet? No, unless ISPs and content providers, or if they are one in the same, are more important than every other industry. ISPs/content providers aren't more important than every other industry and ISPs are more of a utility that needs to be always available, other methods are needed, cutting someone off from a needed service to live is cruel and unusual punishment.
Also awkward is that this ISP is competing on content.
> Last week, HBO went dark for the first time ever after a carriage dispute with Dish. Critics of the merger, include the DOJ, alleged that AT&T may have intentionally failed to come to an agreement with Dish, in an effort to steal Dish's Pay-TV subscribers.
Especially considering that there is more than likely no other option for service in the area because of the ISP totally not being a monopoly, totally not.
Assuming I'm parsing the sarcasm correctly, they can't sign on for any other ISP? So you get a choice of one depending on where you happen to live?
I'm used to what's called local loop unbundling in the UK and Europe - which is the removal of the last mile monopoly, and all ISPs simply putting a DSLAM in exchanges. Initially this was localised, and there were smaller local players, but they're now effectively all nationwide.
Yep. I'm in the 'none' category. On a good day I can get 22Mbps down / 1.5 up. On a bad day it doesn't work at all.
DSL (with a single provider) is my only option for wired internet at home. Satellite and cellular are both available, but with higher prices and sever data caps.
I have an office 1.5 miles away that also has a cable line that can do ~120Mbps down and ~5 up, but the cable lines end about a mile from my house.
Yeah the US does not have local loop unbundling. We need to have it, as it's maybe a good way to start fixing the problem.
It did exist in some form after the 1996 Telecommunications Act so it happened somewhat with DSL providers, but the laws were narrow, didn't address other issues that arise as a result of the law, and didn't include cable/fiber/etc
Interesting, thanks. Despite much complaint at the state of UK broadband, particularly speed variance from distance to exchange or cabinet, LLU has always included whatever came next from ADSL+ through to the current fibre (mostly FTTC) that's almost complete apart from some rural areas. FTTH is still pretty rare sadly.
So any speed differences between ISPs are mostly down to the quality or not of the ISP's network. Which means roughly Talktalk bad, A&A good, but the sync speed should be the same. :)
That's my current experience. Comcast is very fast and low latency. The next best is DSL that maxes out at 2 Mbps. After that my only choice would be some form of wireless.
So if Comcast decides not to sell me service, I'm screwed. They could charge as much as they want and to a point I'd just have to suck it up and pay. I assume the reason it isn't multiple times more expensive is because there is some regulation from the PUC capping what they can charge.
In the US, most homes only have 1 option for wired broadband internet with decent latency. And even then, the upload sucks. Phone line DSL is not decent internet, so unless the phone provider offers fiber, which they very rarely do, you’re at the whim of the company that provides cable television.
ISP sees high amounts of traffic over a public VPN and kicks you off their network for suspicious activity. You go to appeal it in one of their 'courts' and since there aren't really any rules the burden of proof is on you.
You really were pirating so such positive proof doesn't really exist and you're off the internet for good.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons for 'consuming' a large amount of bandwidth. For example, I help seed a number of Linux distro ISOs over bittorrent, and once got a letter from my absolute shit of an ISP (Frontier, if you are reading this, it's you).
Plenty of legitimate usage, I'm talking about the fact that masking your traffic with a VPN isn't really protection when these 'courts' can demand you prove you weren't pirating content in order to restore your service.
So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.
They’re not real courts so no they can’t demand you to prove anything. I don’t know where you’re coming from but it’s nothing but unsubstantiated fear.
Forget the term courts. An ISP is within their rights to refuse to do business with you on the suspicion that you are a suspected pirate. If you then decide to go through their process they are also within their rights to continue not doing business with you until you voluntarily turn over evidence that you were in-fact not pirating content.
And since, for me at least, if I got my internet shut off I would pretty much have to move that's plenty of coercive power.
