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ACLU Study Wary of Broadband Providers
An anonymous reader says "The ACLU recently had a study done that suggests that broadband access is a threat to internet freedom. Their study focuses on the control available to broadband providers who don't have to deal with the same level of competition or regulation as ISP providers. The result is the ability to radically control internet access combined with the omnipresent corporate incentive for profit, whatever the cost to free speech."
What's left to legally justify broadband? Nothing at all. P2P is the only thing that justifies broadband. If you're not using p2p then you can probably get everything you need from a 56K modem and save yourself some money.
I know that there are media enriched sites and game demos that are rather hefty downloads, but with a little patience the average home user could probably save themselves $30 - $60 by just using a modem. But the average home user loves to load up kazaa and download to their hearts desire. The ability to find any movie, music, program, etc file is what the average home user finds as the coolest thing. Thanks to p2p you can now download just about anything you want to download.
It's a catch 22 of mass proportions for ISP's. They want to advertise blazing fast downloads, but they also want to stay in business with as few lawsuits as possible. They aren't censoring information. They are making p2p applications stop working because that's what 99% of the bandwidth for broandband is used for. Cable modems unlike DSL rely on neighborhoods of networks to share bandwidth, if little jimmy 13 year old is constantly downloading full length movies at 900 k/s then that neighborhoods bandwidth is shot.
What's next are we going to go after the department of transportation because they have speed limits up and don't let me drive my porsche as fast as it can go? Blocking p2p is something that I would look for in a broadband company so that I would know that I can have fast downloads. I download OSS software and SDK's all the time that range anywhere from 10megs to 2 gigs. Do you really think I want a 5 k/s download with files that large? Nope, hence why I like blocking p2p.
Everyone who claims that p2p is a right of freedom is the same type of moron that believes handguns are a security device. This is not a violation of America's civil rights and quite frankly I'm getting a little tired of the ACLU always thinking that there is something wrong. Do any of these radical groups ever think that they've won, that the battle is over, that it might be okay to shut the hell up and let people live peacefully.
To those wanting to respond, remember everyone is wrong in someones eyes.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
if you want to stay in 1979, that's your deal. The rest of us will watch with amusement as you whine for things. You're using a system where it's a pain to view pdf's, and you expect the rest of the world to care? btw, i haven't rebooted this 2k system in about 8 mos. try that with x-windows.
> I am a news photographer for FOX.
If this doesn't give the guy credibility, I don't know what does.
Fox News is the boradcast version of the National Enquirer. After all, it was the fine reporting at Fox news that labelled the guy that logged into CNN's online chat as President Clinton after the system crashed as a hacker.