Optimum Online Wants To Ban File Trading
from the biting-the-hand-that-feeds-it dept
John submitted this story about Cablevision's Optimum Online broadband internet access service sending out emails to subscribers telling them they may get in trouble for using various file sharing services. Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with using a file sharing service (there are legitimate uses for them, after all), but it seems that the entertainment industry has gotten to Cablevision. Their reasoning is that it violates the end user agreement saying that customers can't use their connections to run a "server", and that technically these file sharing systems turn computers into servers. What Cablevision seems to be missing is that one of the bigger drivers that made people sign up with them in the first place was the ability to use file sharing systems. Blocking that just means customers are likely to look for broadband providers that are friendlier to those sorts of uses. It seems like something of a bait-and-switch to advertise all the benefits of higher speed access, and then send your customers a letter saying "yes, well, we didn't mean you could actually use all that bandwidth we're providing you...". All this does is open up the opportunity for a broadband provider who is friendly to people who want to actually use the bandwidth they're being offered.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Is peer-to-peer a
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's a problem with perception
They (the broadband sellers) don't usually buy enough bandwidth to cover all of their users being active at one time, just like the phone company doesn't have enough switches/connections for every person in your town to pick up their phones at once and try to talk. They assume that X% of their users will be using bandwidth at any time (for a dial-up ISP, that used to be around 5%) and buy enough bandwidth (or phone lines in the case of a dial-up) to cover that percentage. When more and more people start staying online indefinately the providers have to buy more and more bandwidth to cover, and eventually they hit a saturation point where they can't buy more bandwidth without it costing them more then they're taking in.
The only way to increase revenue is to either sell their already oversaturated service to more people, reduce the amount of usage by their current users or raise rates. We've seen many ISPs wanting to charge their big users more money, and now we see them wanting to make people use less bandwidth.
I use P2P file sharing at home, I log in, find what I want, download it and then disconnect. I would never think to leave it running 24/7 even though my ISP allows me to run a server, just because I respect my ISP and I enjoy the low rates, I don't want to drive them out of business (although since I use DirecTV DSL, they went out of business without my help).
If more and more people would respect their bandwidth and use it appropriately instead of assuming that they're entitled to 24/7 max up/max down on their bandwidth we'd have more ISPs able to stay alive and keep their rates down. Instead, as long as people continue to be greedy and continue to abuse their bandwidth priveleges, we'll have more and more companies going under, less competition, higher rates and (I predict) bandwidth restrictions allowing so many MB/GB per day/week/month. Just wait and see.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]