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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?"
What happens to you if someone runs an extension cord from your house or if you spring an unknown water leak? You get a huge bill and you fix the problem. How is this different?
The best way to do is to be.
If someone steals my credit card number, the credit card company won't even charge me the $50 that they have the legal right to. I doubt that ISPs will be able to fare any better.
The customer pays what is in his contract. Make the language very explicit. There is no reason the ISP should eat it.
Should /. pay the bill for the /. effect?
-Peace
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Give them a complete or partial rebate, the first time, and have a set of "How can I protect myself?" documentation ready for the user. Email it to them, mail it to them, fax it to them, whatever it takes to get them to read it.
Inform them that if they ignore those suggestions, and future problems end up costing them money, then they'll have to foot the bill.
This way, the customer walks away happy and informed, and if they're really willing to be a good net citizen, they won't come back crying.
If they're not willing to do what's required of them, they'll get stuck paying for it.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Protecting yourself from an attack, such as code red, doesn't mean it doesn't still eat bandwidth. It's the same with anything. I noticed today that my mail server was a little slugish. I sshd into it checked the logs and saw the same bastard attempting to send spam to the server and tons of rbl lookups were taking place. So I added the various ip's to the firewalls blacklist. So now the mail isn't processed, but whatever program they are using doesn't even bother to check to see if the mail is being accepted, it just keeps spamming. So, I'm still having a fairly large percentage of my bandwidth being eaten because of a very inconsiderate individual. Stopping code red was the same. At one point I was logging thousands of attempts every day. They were not successful, but they still ate the bandwidth.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is exactly. As it stands now I pay for any bandwidth used regardless of how or why it was used. It would be much better if those charges could be passed along to the person responsible for abusing your bandwidth, but how that could be enforced is beyond me.
One thing I have to note here is that the person posing the question is talking about INBOUND spikes not outbound. So your points are even less relevant.
If you treat your customers like this, you're going to lose them. Simple as that.
I liked the analogy someone else came up with, such as someone running an extension cord from your house to theirs. Who is responsible here?
If I had hosting with your company, and the slammer bug hit servers that your sys admins failed to update, then you better eat that burstable bandwidth bill or a lawsuit couldn't be far behind (depending on the amount, of course). If the servers were my responsibility, including keeping them updated, etc, then I could understand your reasoning.
If a DDoS attack cripples my site, and you expect me to pay for that, you're sorely mistaken.
The simple fact is if they caused it, they paid for it. This includes patches/fixes the customer should've implemented. If you run and maintain that server for them, then no bill increase should be applied.
If someone out in the world caused it, a random malicious event that they just so happened to be on the brunt end of, just throw away that burstable bandwidth bill and make sure your customer knows you did them a favor.
It may not be your place as to pay for that second scenario, but you'll keep your customers longer, keep them happier and keep word of mouth on your company going strong.
It's just good business. Were this my company, I would never even think of treating customers this way.
unfortunately, there would have to be proof of malicious intent, or at LEAST a reasonable knowledge taht linking to the page would cause the business to lose money. /. would have a reasonable knowledge taht linking to the page will cause the page to load slowly, they don't know what sort of connection the page is on, nor is it their responsibility to find out.
While
The day anybody becomes liable for linking to a page on the internet will be the end of the world wide web...that's the whole premise of the thing...
The only thing I can think of is something similar to the robots.txt file...have your webserver have a slashdot.txt file that says something like NoSlashdotLinkage = true in it or something, anything similar to the thing for preventing search engines.
//FIXME: Bad