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Proposed Usenet Death Penalty for Australia's Largest ISP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cutting-off-hand-to-spite-face dept.

supine writes "David Ritz has issued a request for discussion on applying a Usenet Death Penalty to Australia's largest ISP, Bigpond (and it's parent company Telstra)." This brought back to memory the time when AOL was facing similar charges.

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Usenset is still Useful by rf0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You just need to know which groups to look at. For certain specialist things it can provide decent information and a reasonable community. Also the UDP does work as was shown with blueyonder.co.uk a year ago or so. They were threatened and quickly cleaned up their act when they saw the impact

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
  2. Re:telstra have problems by questamor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Telstra give a shit, I think. When i've dealt with them and only needed to handle one department, the service and people have been fine. The odd problem, but they've been on-par with anyone else.

    Problems come up when one department of telstra need to talk to another. There's just no useful communication between groups, no trust from one section to another.

    I once had a billing issue I had to contact telstra about. Billing attempted several times to contact the technical dept that did the work. That just didn't happen after 3 weeks, despite constantly calling Billing.

    After a day of phoning around I was able to get through to one of the engineering departments who performed phone work for me, and they immediately saw the error and attempted to get back in contact with Billing. It took another month, and *ME* faxing information sent to me by engineering, to actually get anything resolved.

    It could have been fixed overnight if there was appropriate communicationbetween departments. I get the feeling telstra like breaking up into little bureaucratic bundles, each with their own world.

  3. Hypocritical ? by tmark · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Yesterday, there was an article about the /. effect and most posters seemed to be arguing that /. should not be liable for /. effect-related charges, on the grounds that if you have a website, you're asking for traffic for the world, and that /. should in no way be responsible for notification of the /.'ed website.

    Yet when it comes to spam, most posters here are prepared to swing the heaviest hammer they can find at supposed offenders. But I wonder whether this is hypocritical.

    Let's consider the parallels:
    • email and websites under consideration are both available to the Net public at large
    • both spam and the /. effect may be unsolicited. While some sites may seek exposure on /., certainly many did not.
    • both spam and the /. effect can be great inconveniences, but the /. effect can force the victim to incur huge, one-time charges - at least spam costs are absorbable for the average little guy.
    • there is no good way to opt-out of spam, and no good way to opt-out of the /. effect
    • spammers and /. would probably both claim it is beyond the scope of their responsibilities to check whether their targets are willing/able to handle increased load due to their activities.
    • spam companies make money indirectly from inconveniencing their victims, because they provide some of them with useful information (people do buy things from spammers after all). /. makes whatever money it makes from /.'ing its victims by using the /.'ed website provide content for its own benefit.

    Is this a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". ?