Brett:
I certainly don't advocate breaking contracts in force between a willing
vendor and customer. I was speaking in very broad terms about firewall
behavior; generally everyone agrees that spam and botnet attacks are bad
and we should try to block them. I also respect your right and
responsibility to protect your network from abuse, and to protect your
customers from each other, but I guess the big debate on this list is
over what constitutes "abuse" versus reasonable and allowable use of
bandwidth, or what constitutes "interference" versus reasonable and
allowable network management and protection.
I am not familiar with your terms of use, nor am I a lawyer so I won't
debate whether p2p inherently violates them, or whether you have the
right under those terms to block or throttle packets based on the use of
particular applications. If your customers signed that agreement, and
the terms forbid what they are trying to do, and permit what you are
trying to do, then they have to live with it. Perhaps I'll read my ISPs
terms of use...
I'm glad to see both sides of the debate are allowed to flower here. As
Sy Syms says "an educated consumer is our best customer (r)" (sorry - if
you are not in his market area see http://www.syms.com/) so we'd all be
better off (vendors and customers) if everyone meant what they said and
said what they meant, and customers read and understood the EULA and
made their free-market decisions.
Ed J.
Brett Glass wrote:
[A few responses to messages on the list, concatenated for brevity. -BG]
<snip>
Ed J. writes:
There should always be a very good reason, mutually acceptable to the network operator and its customers, for any blocking.
How about that it was agreed to by contract and therefore was
mutually accepted by both parties at the get-go?
<snip>
--Brett Glass
