<snip>
> What the ISPs want, really, is to somehow discover a new
> revenue stream from these gateways and people like Jack. Would
> Jack pay an extra $5 a month "maintenance service" for his new
> gateway? He might, if it *really* did something valuable for him.
<snip>
Ah, but therein lies another conundrum... if you let your users do the
valuable and interesting stuff, there will be two problems -- decreased
reliability and increased support cost due to decentralization of core
features (mail, web proxy, etc), and increased vulnerability to security
issues. Thence ultra-restrictive Terms of Service documents like
@Home's. I have an inside view of this due to the local @Home abuse
manager being a friend of my wife's -- they don't particularly want to
prevent their users doing interesting stuff like mail service,
masquerading, etc. Unfortunately the people doing it tend to drop in a
RedHat box without thinking about the consequences. They get nailed
within hours and become spam and porn relays with ultra-fast upstream
connections, and @Home has to struggle to stay off the MAPS RBL and the
FBI's top 10.
I don't think it'll be too long before the big ISPs all take steps to
prevent their users from doing their own DNS, mail, web servers, etc.,
and end-users wanting to do that will have to go back to the mom-n-pops
where service is more expensive but higher quality. You might have an
insight into this that I'd like to hear -- aren't you the guy who used
to run the Bay Area ISP best.net?
--
Jack Coates
Monkeynoodle: It's what's for dinner!
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