[e2e] Re: crippled Internet

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: RJ Atkinson <rja at inet.org>

> ...
>         The AUP gives them legal aircover to shut down bandwidth
> hogs that are bandwidth hogs due to improper servers.  The most 
> common case I know of was folks with GNUtella or illegal (due 
> to copyright law) ftp/http servers with MP3s.  @Home only checks 
> for bandwidth hogs when there are performance complaints about 
> a specific residential subnet.  When there is a bandwidth hog
> identified due to that circumstance, there is nearly always
> (in my experience, it was ALWAYS an MP3 server) an inappropriate
> server.  For folks like most of us, @Home doesn't check or care
> about a small ftp or http server, provided it doesn't cause
> other customers to have visible performance degradation.
>
>         I might wish the US legal system were other than it is,
> but it is what it is.  The legal system drives the AUP text,
> not the actual practices of the operator.

The poblem has nothing to do with the U.S. legal system, but with sloppy
and lazy pointy haired managers and/or ISP's that have unadmitted goals
that they hope lusers won't think about.  If @Home only wanted to limit
bandwidth, then it could by saying so in its AUP.  Please notice the title
and the rest of the section I quoted from http://www.home.com/support/aup/
Also recall the many years that some ISP's have charged for peak and
average bandwidth actually used.

The words "inappropriate server" suggest some other sloppy thinking.
According to that AUP, *any* server is "inappropriate," regardless of
copyright or other considerations.  That @Home might not currently
filter SYN's addressed to your port 80, 25, 21, or 23 does not imply
they won't start or don't now on some networks.

There are claims that most "dialup" (for naive definitions of that)
bandwidth is now being filter of SYNs to port 25 for most IP addresses.
I'm not in a position to test those claims, but there is evidence that
UUNet is now doing a lot of port 25 filtering.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at rhyolite.com