Slashdot Mirror
Bad Behavior on the 'Net - Who Pays the Bandwidth Bill?
rakolam asks: "I am involved with network management in the hosting department of a fairly large ISP. Constantly we have customers who dispute inbound bandwidth spikes and demand service credits on their burstable connections. Events such as the Slammer Virus literally have everyone knocking on their salesperson's door at the end of the billing cycle. My position is that the internet is a public space, and by placing themselves in that space, one has to realize the consequences (and the implications of burstable billing). I'd like Slashdot's perspective on this. Should ISP's ultimately eat the costs of malicious behavior? Is the customer ultimately responsible for the bandwidth they've generated, regardless if it's desired or not? Is this a new frontier for insurance companies?"
Not a very good analogy. More like you have an electrical socket outside your house, and you have a sign that says, "Use me". Then you get upset when the circus comes to town and powers everything off your socket.
-prator
Well there's an easy solution for businesses: Just never have anything on your site that would interest slashdot readers (or editors). No more /. effect!
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
Hi Jeff, this is Cox's Customer Service Bot #25. Your transgression last month has been recorded and the technical team enjoyed watching of all seven "Barbie Wardrobe" CDs in the series. We are now in the evaluating stage and will inform you of your punishment in the next month's bill.
Best wishes,
Bot #25
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Holy cow, that circus next door, it's not free?!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Since 99.99% of all virus/trojan/worm attacks are the result of Microsoft's piss-poor security, I say charge the extra bandwith spikes due to something like this back to Microsoft!
No matter where you go... there you are.
One way or another...
Oh yes, he will pay.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
the hell was the point of that post (other than to promote your site?)
circus clowns are a bunch of alcoholic, free-loading, child-molesting greasepaint freaks. not only would they loot your water cooler for every drop they could get, they'd crap on your lawn and sodomize the family pet while you're not looking.
If the service provider was nice at all they would provide a log or usage stats via email to the customer stating they are coming close to max bandwidth or a warning that they've exceeded their bandwidth.
"Hello, this is your credit card company. You're credit card's been stolen."
"Huh? Oh, crap, it has!"
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
no no no. what's it's like is like this, it's like an electric company that figures out a way to make electricity out of water and then sells it in drinking fountains outside your house on the black market when nobody's looking and sometimes they sneak inside your house steal your cheese puffs and then they have these secret sales where they raise the price of the water but say that they're including these "free" cheese puffs and then these clowns-- you know the ones from IT (not your IT dept. but the movie that steven king made) anyway so these clowns they take the electricity and they give it to their circus, but it turns out it's really an evil circus that the old water company put there because nobody is buying their water anymore and everyone is just going nuts and they have a huge food fight -- it's friggin' awesome let me tell you... my friend daniel went to school in ohio and he said that onetime there was a foodfight there and someone threw a cupcake right at the lunchlady's face... her face!! uh, what were you saying about the evil water clowns?
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