ISP Capping Is Becoming the New DRM

Crazzaper writes "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."

Comments

Trust-busting, can we say it boys and girls?

[jollyreaper]

Too big to fail = too big to risk leaving whole. Too much concentration of power leads to abuses. When mergers happen and the CEO's gloat about efficiencies of scale, they're talking about putting Americans out of work. And where do all those savings go? Fat CEO paychecks. Keeping those jobs in pay ain't inefficiency, it's redundancy in the engineering sense, like "let's have redundant control cables on the airplane so if one set goes out, we won't fall out of the sky. Let's have lots of banks so if a couple fail, we don't lose the whole industry." When Republicans bleat about class warfare and wealth redistribution, they forget to mention that they threw the first punch.

This Time-Warner BS is no different from GE buying up a news network so they can create more favorable coverage of their business interests. Propaganda is wrong; propagandists are liars and should be treated as such.

Re:You know what today is children? It's kill a pi

[Anonymous Coward]

I have facts for those who think and arguments for those who reason. In the text that follows, I don't intend to recount all of the damage caused by Time Warner's worthless ipse dixits but I do want to point out that I insist that the best way to overcome misunderstanding, prejudice, and hate is by means of reason, common sense, clear thinking, and goodwill. Time Warner, in contrast, believes that it's okay to abet a resurgence of selfish sesquipedalianism. The conclusion to draw from this conflict of views should be obvious: I like to face facts. I like to look reality right in the eye and not pretend it's something else. And the reality of our present situation is this: Time Warner's coadjutors are merely ciphers. Time Warner is the one who decides whether or not to compromise the things that define us, including integrity, justice, love, and sharing. Time Warner is the one who gives out the orders to fabricate all sorts of thrasonical ad-hoc rules and regulations. And Time Warner is the one trying to conceal how it occasionally shows what appears to be warmth, joy, love, or compassion. You should realize, however, that these positive expressions are more feigned than experienced and invariably serve an ulterior motive, such as to reinforce the impression that balmy practitioners of stoicismâ"as opposed to Time Warner's gruntsâ"are striving to promote the sort of behavior that would have made the folks in Sodom and Gomorrah blush.

One other thing: By allowing Time Warner to take advantage of human fallibility to make a fetish of the virtues of mephitic animalism, we are allowing it to play puppet master. I'll go over that again: Only the impartial and unimpassioned mind will even consider that dodgy carpetbaggers have exerted care always to use high-sounding words like "anatomicophysiologic" to hide Time Warner's plans to implement a drugged-out parody of justice called "Time Warner-ism". That's self-evident, and even Time Warner would probably agree with me on that. Even so, some vindictive condescending-types are actually considering helping it interfere with the most important principles of democracy. How quickly such people forget that they were lied to, made fun of, and ridiculed by Time Warner on numerous occasions.

According to Time Warner, we should all bear the brunt of its actions. It might as well be reading tea leaves or tossing chicken bones on the floor for divination about what's true and what isn't. Maybe then Time Warner would realize that if natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species then it is clearly going to be the first to go. It would be bad enough if Time Warner's representatives were merely trying to arouse the hostility and excite the cupidity of ethically bankrupt party animals. But their attempts to impede the free flow of information are just plain nasty. I have now said everything there is to say. So, to summarize it all, Time Warner is perfectly willing to show its embarrassingly poor reasoning and warped ethics in print.

Re:how do you accept it?

[GargamelSpaceman]

What are the penalties for viewing porn in Turkey? Is that stuff filtered out? Maybe nobody wants to look at the content that is left...

Or maybe Turkey is a free society. I honestly don't know.