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Academic Network Censorship?
Mark asks: "I'm the President of the Brock University Students' Union, and recently our IT geeks completely cut off access to the Kazaa network for the entire school. It concerns me, while I understand the need to save bandwidth.. what's next? File sharing bandwidth has been throttled for quite some time here, this is the first all out "restriction" we have seen. As a Students' Union we advocate on behalf of the 13,000+ students here, and we need to develop policy around network 'censorship.' I'd love to hear your experiences and suggestions. Our website is here"
Actually, at this particular university the bandwidth was payed for by selling part of it to others in the area. Students who lived off campus payed nothing for network access at the public labs.
Students who lived on campus payed $5 a semester for a high speed connection. That's NOTHING compared to the cost of the multiple T3s.
Anyway, the express purpose of the network is for academic use. And that's never been questioned, and no academic use has been stopped. But when a P2P generates Terrabytes of data a day, there's not a whole lot of other options but to ban it.
Everyone on the university network here has a full Internet connection, apart from the Windows Networking (NetBIOS/SMB/CIFS) ports, which work locally but are firewalled at the edge of the university. There's no data rate limiting other than the limitations of the hardware (my college was wired up with 10MBit hubs last year, but they've upgraded to 100MBit switches this year; I've had the full 100MBit download rate while ftp'ing Mandrake ISOs from another college's mirror, so there's certainly no artificial cap there).
If anyone uses significant amounts of bandwidth (there's no formal limit, but it seems to be measured in gigabytes a day), they're told to reduce that for the benefit of other users (on a "please stop before we have to force you to" basis).
This is great, because when you want to download something big (a CD image for instance), you get a huge data rate and don't have to wait long, but the network admins can still prevent people from downloading stuff constantly and overloading the network.
I suppose a more automated equivalent would be to give everyone the full 10/100 bandwidth to start with, then automagically reduce priority for people who've used too much in the last week/month/whatever.
It can be argued, and has been successfully, but not specifically regarding a network.
An example I'm thinking of is Humbodlt State in CA. They built a new library and, as is usually the case, there were cost and time overruns. The students sued the school since they were paying for access to this new library, which wasn't available to them, and won.
The difference here, of course, is the non-academic use.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Yes, but every vendor is allowed to define what services it offers to its customers. Just because I pay you $x for product Y, does not mean I have the right to demand you also give me product Z.
By the same token, universities are able to compete with one another for students by advertising less restrictive policies on net usage, if they want to. Thing is, the legal risk from the MPAA and RIAA make them not want to.