Daniel V. Reinhardt put forth on 7/21/2010 2:06 PM: > Your average joe doesn't need to be running servers, and if you want business > class services and abilities then pay for it.
Class warfare and/or financial means arguments are invalid in this discussion. > Bandwidth costs money. You can't > have your cake and eat it too. Any consumer running his/her own MX/outbound for the family and the dog is going to consume 1000 fold or more bandwidth over TCP 80 then they ever would over TCP 25, even if infected with a spam bot or 9. Thus this argument is invalid as well. What you are attempting to do here is define SMTP traffic as a "special class" of service reserved for a "special class" of users, in your words, those who pay more. By your rationale, it now becomes the ISPs' decision to decide what application protocols/ports fall into various "special charge" categories, and thus begin charging different customers different rates based on what applications they use, be those SMTP, P2P, HTTP, etc. In the case of Comcast throttling P2P traffic, the FTC and the courts came down on the side of consumer rights and, yes, "Net Neutrality". The Net Neutrality concept in a nutshell is that all TCP//UDP IP ports and packet types are _equal_ and shall not be unilaterally blocked or manipulated in a negative way by ISPs and/or others. Even though I'm a fervent supporter of Net Neutrality, because I'm heavily anti-spam as well, I always promote that ISPs block TCP 25 by default, but give immediate access to those customers who ask for it. This helps eliminate bot spam yet keeps the ISPs from running completely afoul of Net Neutrality principals. It's a win for everyone. Well, everyone except those who've already bought into the "pay more if you wanna play" philosophy who get bitter and jealous when another consumer can host all services s/he wants to on the cheapest line available from a different ISP. The "jealously/sour grapes attitude" has no place in this discussion and is invalid. No one should have to pay more for TCP 25 or TCP 143 access than one does for TCP 80 or TCP 443 access. Arguing otherwise simply demonstrates one's knuckles drag the ground when s/he walks. ;) -- Stan
