Slashdot Mirror
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"
No one is forced to live on campus. If you don't like it, move off. If you really want to trade MP3s, then get a dial-up account and dial off campus. Actually, at my school you have to live on campus for two years (freshman and sophmore) so just moving off and getting my own internet connection is not an option. Now, please explain to me how not allowing P2P networks on a private academic network is the same as censorship. Lets say that MSN or Comcast announces tomorrow that they have banned all P2P acess to their customers. Can you imigine the outcry and protests they would get from customers? The customers, being as angry as they are, would switch over to other broadband or dialup providers because they have a choice. On a network at a university, we don't have such a wonderful choice, and we dont have the freedom to pass from one provider to the next with a couple phone calls. So to get what we want, we will fight for it, and protest how we are now, and be shot down like people such as yourself who just don't understand "those kids".
SecondPageMedia - Wha