http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...sps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/index.html Reality: This is just an easy way out for ISPs who have vastly oversold their network capacity.
I've been waiting for the ball to drop on across the board ISP filtering for a while now. This is no suprise. The thing is that file sharing is here to stay. It's like a hydra- you cut off one head, two grow back in it's place. Some ingenious hacker-types will develop some encryption standard that will make the filtering obsolete. That standard will spread virally and be the new defacto p2p standard overnight while the ISPs scramble to catch up. Once the ISPs figure out a way to filter that... Rinse, repeat. In the meantime, we are paying for all of the filtering technologies with increased fees. It's time for big media to embrace the trend instead of fighting it and figure out a way to make money off of it, like releasing media with commercials embedded that is free for all.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that DMCA specifically exempts ISPs and media hosting sites from liability. There is no good reason for ISPs to care about this other than avoiding the inevitiable infrastructure upgrades as bandwidth usage soars. Crooks, all of em! Check out freenet. Heck, just VPN communities would easily do the job.
I was seriously thinking of switching to AT&T, mostly because of the iPhone, but no way in hell, now.
There was a story yesterday about the FCC fining Comcast for throttling bandwidth. The cost could reach over a trillion dollars!!! http://mashable.com/2008/01/08/fcc-may-fine-comcast-up-to-177-trillion/ This is just a convenient way for the ISP's to save on bandwidth costs hidden in the concept of protecting copyrights. It's moronic. Net neutrality IS ultimately the way of the future. This is pretty much like DRM for music. It may go that way for a while, but there will always be a workaround and, like everything else stupid, it will disappear.
The golden days of the internet ended with the dot com crash in 2001. Other than social networking and torrents, things really haven't improved since then.
