Another Inventor of the Internet Wants To Gag It

MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

Comments

Re:so what

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want, and then if you go over 75, a cop will show up and give you a ticket, anyway, wouldn't you complain, too?

Roads without speed limit signs (and there are a lot of them, at least here in NY) are limited to the state speed limit (55 in our case). You can still be pulled over and ticketed for going 55 on them if a cop deems that the speed is unsafe for the current road conditions.

As for complaining, people will complain about the same amount whether they get ticketed for reckless driving or for speeding. They're upset that they got nailed for doing something that they, generally, knew they shouldn't be doing in the first place because it's "not fair" that they got ticketed while "nobody else" does.

You can hog the available bandwidth all you want... but the more you do it, the more likely the internet cop is going to pull you over. You'll complain that 99% of people don't get "ticketed" but that still doesn't change the fact that you were abusing the service. That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed to be a shared service between multiple people, splitting the cost of the full 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe between them. If you want full, unfettered access to your total subscribed bandwidth, look into pricing a T2 (or building a private road if we want to keep up the car analogy) and try not to choke on what it really costs for that much unlimited bandwidth. Maybe then, you'll be grateful you're only paying $40 or $50 a month to share it.

Re:so what

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

wouldn't a better car analogy be that drivers with certain cargo are being forced to drive slower than people who have the "acceptable" cargo load.

That's the case as well... a house mover will drive down the road at a slower speed than someone in a regular vehicle (and if they drive as fast as the rest of the traffic, they're likely guilty of reckless driving). Ditto for highway trucks out plowing and whatnot (they like to stick around 30 mph to optimize their plowing and sand/salt coverage unless they're on an actual highway). You'll also find a lot of roads that limit the gross vehicle weight allowed on the road, so that tractor trailers can't drive on some roads becaus those roads weren't designed for them since they'll tear them up/warp them (kinda like how DOCSIS is designed for downloading, not uploading).

I would love to see that as a comcast commercial.

Commercials are there to entice you into buying, not to give you all of full information about a product. That's what all the fine print in the contract is for. If you don't read the contracts you sign, that's your fault. Caveat Emptor.