Speakeasy forum: Verizon claims constitutional right to restrict access...

I often try and place myself in their shoes.

Firstly I have no clue about the Constitution. I mean, really no clues. I wonder if the forefathers ever envisaged high speed internet in the 17th and 18th centuries.

But back to their shoes. If I intended to start up as an ISP:

1] I am bound by existing laws.

2] If I have 1000 customers but my bandwidth is only enough for 900 customers at full speed, what do I do? I throttle back so everyone has a share.

3] Do those laws force me to purchase more bandwidth? What if I can't? What if I don't want to because my company's finances don't allow it or if there is no more bandwidth available? Do I throw the towel in and shut the company down?

4] What if I believe I have the right to limit my customers? It's my business, my bandwidth to allocate as I see fit.

5] I am a law abiding citizen anyway. I hate those who break the law and I don't want that in my business. I believe that file sharing, or Piracy as I call it, is breaking the law whether others do or not. I will clamp down hard on any customers who are breaking the law and, while doing so, are poaching bandwidth from my other law abiding citizens. What is wrong with that point of view?

So, there you go. I am not in the business of course but if my ISP tells me that someone is hogging all the bandwidth on illegal file sharing so that I only get a half what I paid for, I know what my response would be.

Mark

Lots of places in WV don't have broadband internet at all. Many small communities offered cable TV providers exclusive no-competition 10 year contracts to put in cable TV systems back in the 1960's. Those 10 year contract periods still exist for many localities, which now includes internet, too.

As for Verizon? They actually bailed on WV and sold all their infrastructure to Frontier Communications, so no more Verizon telephone or internet for us. I paid my last Verizon bill back in 2009.

However, if Verizon gets their way, I still might have to pay them a fee, so that any of my web pages I already pay hosting and bandwidth fees for... will load at a reasonable speed if one of their customers goes to one of my web sites.

by license through the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission. I have to use Rogers because that's who provides all the coverage for Toronto and many neighbouring communities. Shaw Media, for which a friend works is more vertically integrated and owns a Network of stations across Canada, as well as Cable Service provision for great tracts of Canada. All of the Providers are very large businesses, and all have more than their fair share of detractors, because they can act quasi unilaterally to decide content, and more irritatingly Packaging. To get the channels I want, I have to pay for more than 100 I don't want. I do have individual stations which one can pick out and bundle together for a surcharge, like MSNBC or the Military Channel. I have 5 of them which cost $6 a month as a bundle.

You don't like it, you're left with the situation Lenny Bruce described in his rant against Bell Telephone before it was broken up, two Dixie cups and a string.

But remember that after Ma Bell was dismembered in the name of competition and lower prices, everybody's bills went up except for businesses whose costs went down because they acted cohesively, not to say in collusion, to whip-saw the providing companies into competing for their business.

Rob

well chosen, particularly the Turnpike analogy. Thanks, Grim, for nailing it all together in a comprehensible form.

As noted before, this is Verizon trying to step into Trust and Combine territory addressed by Teddy Roosevelt. I forget who it was (actually it's at the back of my mind playing hide and seek with my fingers) but he owned the mines, the houses the miners lived in, the store they bought provisions from, the trains that hauled his goods, the tracks they ran on, the Steel plant in Pittsburgh, the steel workers homes, and subsequent distribution systems. He charged what he wanted, and nobody could gainsay him. Rockefeller was the same in Oil, Carnegie in Steel, Peabody (pronounced Peavey) in Coal. Aluminum was Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America. There were Copper Barons and Steel Barons and Coffee Barons (the Folgers), and Banana Barons (The United Fruit Company and its founder) and a dozen others, all conspiring to lower their costs and raise their prices, and keep their profits in an era free from most taxation. Many qualified in more than one category. Rockefeller was in Mining as well.

Carnegie was sufficiently enlightened, that he founded the American system of free lending libraries (In England and his Native Scotland you had to pay a fee), and fired Frick for his actions in breaking a strike in Pittsburgh resulting in deaths. Not that that bothered Frick much, he just moved on to a more rapacious employer, and continued to build his art collection which can be seen in his Museum in Washington.

Rob

uploading files or could leech by paying some small fee. They could be bumped or banned by the sysop anytime or for any reason. It was slow but could be fun. Had to learn about X, Y an Z modem stuff, Hayes command set and init string tweaks. All forgotten now. Just tossed my trusty USR Courier v.everything last week rather than try to sell it.

No freedom of anything. Some boards were open and some were pay. Yes, membership was required on most and following the rules kept one in good stead. One such rule was usually some kind of upload/download ratio expectation. Another rule was the amount of time one was allowed to hog the sysop's phone line. There were user interest sites but what I recall them to be used largely for was shareware software distribution. There were several versions of board and user software. If memory serves me correctly, Mustang Wildcat was widely popular with boards. Procomm Plus (sp) was very popular with end users but I used Telix. Most all of this was shareware stuff which you paid if you liked it and wanted to continue using it.

One could get wrapped up in BBS stuff. Each session was a new phone call and you'd get to know how good your connection was by how the modem sounded while negotiating a connection. I believe the terms "training" and "retraining" were used during this process.

Starting to ramble here but remember a lot of late evenings with sticky coke spots and cookie crumbs all over the keyboard tray.

I wasted too much of mine. Sorry for the apparent hijack here but I think I see what Bob was saying by making that comment and comparison...putting things into perspective, so to speak. My internet use, yours and others will be different so I'm not able to see the issue you are either experiencing or expect will be coming. Verizon doesn't provide my service either. This leaves me without much comment to make. The root cause seems to be lack of bandwidth to cover the different types of traffic. This isn't unlike the highway system and the eventual need for limited access roadways. We pay "tolls" for road use too...some at booths and some through taxes. There's bickering about fairness in that regard as well. About the only thing certain is that we'll never run out of things to worry or complain about. If we did, we'd be a miserable and expressionless lot.

you can still do direct person to person if you and they both still have a phone modem in the computer and don't want to send something across the internet. I used to do that with Dad for some of his business stuff, but eventually we settled on just using password protected zip files to send stuff by email. By phone modem is still one of the most private ways to share files and not be tracked across the internet since you don't use it. (The most secure however is burn a CD and snail mail.)

However in today's world it's not practical unless both are still on POTS, because anything done on VOIP phone line is still across the internet. Just for curiosity I disconnected my LAN connect to broadband modem and tried using VOIP with my phone modem to dial up Juno connection and it actually worked, but of course would be redundant and slow since VOIP capability means broadband is working OK. Fax works over VOIP too. However, if one had the Verizon FIOS phone service (which I don't, I use an alternate VOIP now) when the power is out you can use the phone system for 7-8 hours with a laptop on dialup since it has a battery for that. Better solution during power outage is I can run a power cord from my van's inverter into my router and computer and still use broadband service, if the entire FIOS system isn't down. The recent storms which knocked out the power for 44% of the county here still didn't interrupt the FIOS system at my home.

Unless you are visiting relatives or friends in the boonies, phone modems are pretty much useless anymore. Eventually everything will be internet and almost already is I think, except in more rural areas where copper still rules. Even there a lot of rural areas have cable TV with it's internet services. My first broadband was through the cable TV company, but still used Juno as a dialup service through old copper phone lines for when cable was down. Now it's all optical here so if that goes out there's no backup system at all to use. I suppose one could take a trip with laptop to a McDonald's or another open wireless area if needed during an outage.

Memory lane.

I had, actually may still have a USR modem in a box around here, but I found a modem called Broadxent with the Creative chip in it to work a lot better holding a connection on a bad line. The USR was very touchy and would drop the line when some static interfered, which was a disappointment during the dialup days, but that Broadxent modem hung on like a bulldog.

... and BBS... was it moot if one used VOIP?

But then again, I don't know why a modem shouldn't work on VOIP.

and the rights pertaining. Independent recording artists encourage Downloading, Bruce Springsteen used to make jokes about Bootleg records of his performances, while Columbia, who were perfectly capable refused to release any performances. Columbia put his nuts in a vice, and eventually sued a bootlegger using his name. Bootleg Records never impacted sales of the artists material. They were more expensive than regular records, contained already released material generally, and the people who bought them were fanatic devotees of the artist. They had to be, to find a record retailer who would sell them bootlegged albums and risk losing their supplier of big name labels.

The question of how much is fair for an Application, or an Operating System, is fraught with complications, but there is a book called Micro Serfs about the people who actually wrote the code for MicroSoft, weren't paid very handsomely, and were worked to exhaustion. It's great to be Bill Gates (who bought DOS from a guy who wrote the code for $50,000) and I gather if you're in management it's great to work in Redmond, Washington for them, but for the University Educated guys in the trenches, it's as appetizing as digging ditches and tunnels by hand, and the loss rate from fatigue, injury and breakdown is just as high as it was in the 19th Century Mining and Public Works sectors.

Rob

Restraint of Trade, which cuts both ways, Prior Restraint, you can't stop somebody from doing something until they've actually done it, and Freedom of Speech. Software, Audio and Video Piracy is still a grey area, though a lot darker grey than when it was just casette audio tapes, which the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) fought it to the Supreme Court and lost, just as it lost with regard to Video Tape.

The troubles arising from "facilitating transfer" of illegal or copyrighted material runs into problems involving the postal system, interstate trucking regulations and every other means of transfer, and is thus not easily decided.

Rob