Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House of Representatives on campus downloading)

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>
Date: May 4, 2007 8:38:33 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net, ip@v2.listbox.com
Cc: lauren@vortex.com
Subject: Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House  
of Representatives on campus downloading)

At 06:00 PM 5/4/2007, Lauren Weinstein wrote:

> You can bet that even as universities are the target today,
> conventional ISPs and their users in general will be in the
> crosshairs tomorrow.

In a sense, we are in the crosshairs now. Because we are in
a university town, and our local university is cracking down
on music and software piracy, people who engage in these
activities are migrating off of the University network and
asking us for service. They are also going to hotspots which
we provide for businesses, attempting to monopolize the
bandwidth at those locations. (We have been forced to employ
anti-hogging and anti-piracy measures to keep them from doing
so.)

Abuses by these people and the software they host threaten to
cripple our service. Ironically, the University, with its
government-funded link to Internet2, could shoulder the load
far better than we can with our more expensive bandwidth. We
try to encourage these people to patronize our competitors
(the cable and telephone monopolies) to avoid the problem.
But ultimately, something must give. We can't afford to host
illegal activity or to allow our networks to be monopolized
by it when so many of our users have legal, important work
to do.

--Brett Glass



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