Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Taking a New Tack On Net Neutrality?
An anonymous reader writes "I am the IT director for a large rental property company that owns approximately 15,000 apartments in college towns across America. The board of directors has tasked me with exploring whether we can 'privatize' our network (we provide network access as part of rent in all of our properties) and charge certain commercial entities for access to our residents. Right now the network is more or less open, except that we block access (by court order) to certain sites at the request of various copyright holders. Specifically, they are interested in targeting commercial providers of services directed at college students, such as textbook rental firms, online booksellers, and so on. With approximately 35,000 residents, I guess they are thinking there is a substantial profit to be made here. Personally I don't like it one bit, but I thought I would ping Slashdot for thoughtful opinions. I imagine the phones will start ringing off the hook if students suddenly lose access to places like Amazon.com. I think it has 'bad idea' written all over it. What do you think?"
Are you saying they want to hold them captive to only the sites you want them to go to for profit sake? The kids will just rebel and bring in their own access...
Ok, its OT, but since when did US courts start mandating blocking of sites by ISPs?
Back on topic, it should not be hard to come up with the numbers and present it to management. Forget the 'it will be a bad idea' as it will only make you look disgruntled and biased, all they care about is raw numbers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The question is whether they have alternatives? If not, then a closed network is just like any other feature. An open internet access would be something viewed more favorably like an extra bathroom maybe. Plus, if it's only to get more money for commercial services---maybe people won't care.
Do you do the same with the phone system or TV channels? Are commercial numbers or OTA channels (by way of shared antenna) blocked unless there is a kickback of profit? I'd be super pissed finding someone messing with internet, phone, or TV. I think we put up with legal requests if made by court order and for health of the network somewhat but not just for profit.
"charge certain commercial entities for access to our residents." How? They get to track the residents? Insert ads into their sessions? Redirect traffic like you're implying?
Yep this does sound like a really bad idea. That board of yours needs some better ideas on how to leverage a captive audience.
Other people have already commented on the relatively horrifying moral considerations, and some have noted that college students will figure out other ways to get their access. There's one thing that I haven't seen addressed yet: The sites you really care about, the ones that are very very popular, simply don't care about a hostage population of 35,000 students. You see news of Netflix signing deals with Comcast, and some of your management people think they could get Netflix to give them some money as well ... well, they won't. And I can't imagine Chegg (or, HA, Amazon) doing so either. It A) doesn't materially benefit them; and B) starts a horrifying precedent that they'll negotiate with ANYONE.
If you provide network access as part of your rent, you provide network access as part of your rent, period.
You may consider deals with additional sites that are only accessible from dedicated networks, like some online publishers offering downloadable journals/papers at blanket rates for universities.
It is unlikely that any of those will pay you, however. It is rather additional value you can offer to your students. It's possible that you can advertise promotions for that kind of thing (like when they are made available for four weeks on your network) on a central network information site and get percentages either for the promotions or for subscriptions reached through them.
But blocking anything that is normally free: no go. You have to try monetizing the inverse.
You hopefully have some idea of the internal politics about the request -- whether this is something that a majority of the directors strongly wants to do, whether they are just curious, or whether they are leaning towards the idea but could be swayed. Take advantage of that in your response! Be respectful of their intentions, and don't go out of your way to antagonize either supporters or opponents of the idea, but you can either influence the decision or at least register your concerns.
If you are opposed to the idea (would you ask Slashdot otherwise?), point out the technical and legal considerations in carrying it out. Explain the extent of technical methods to prevent tech-savvy young students from using VPNs and other proxies to access the blocked sites. If this means you need to upgrade your network infrastructure with newer or beefier routers, put a dollar figure on that. Find polls of how consumers view this kind of network filtering, with bonus points if the polls focus on or break out your renters' demographic group, and point out the risk to revenue. If you don't know the regulatory risks and potential tort claims in detail, outline them at a high level and recommend that the company retain legal counsel to advise on those things.
Because you're the IT guy, they probably view you as a subject matter expert, and you can use that authority to guide their thinking. Just keep in mind the audience for your report, and respond in a way that shows respect for both their level(s) of technical background and their business objectives.
You could do this completely dick move, but be sure never to describe what you are offering as internet service, nor be deceptive when advertising so as to make tenants think you are providing internet service. It would be akin to advertising free cable when the only channels on that "cable" are CCTV of your board of directors masturbating over the idea of "mad profitz".
This is precisely what the big carriers are trying to do.
They should expect multiple lawsuits, which they will lose.
They may wish to consult an attorney who's admitted to Federal District Court with expertise in FCC law.
Or, you can just sit back and watch the fireworks.
You have been asked to "explore" the possibility. Bluntly put, they are asking your expert opinion. And that should include the following:
1. Technical challenges: do you need to buy new routers/software? How can you implement billing?
2. Costs: What additional tech support will be required. You would be derelict in your duty if you don't at least estimate how many phone calls at 20 minutes each at $xxx/hour must be answered.
3. Tenant response (if any). Would people move out? Would there be a lawsuit (even if you win, lawsuits are expensive...)
I suggest that you do your job and explore this carefully and honestly. Slashdot is the first step in a brutal assignment (I don't think #1 is trivial). You are a professional...they don't pay you for a political opinion and they need some real technical insight.
Once you have the entire picture, review it with some board members one on one.
I bet there is an internal fight in the boardroom and you may find a few people praying you will come back and say: "It will cost $35 million dollars a year, we will face civil litigation for the next five years, and lose 10% of our long term tenants." Of course, if the board figures they will make $350 million a year you will be setting up the network.
> Specifically, they are interested in targeting commercial providers of services directed at college students, such as textbook rental firms, online booksellers, and so on. With approximately 35,000 residents,
All of these provide relatively static content, not streaming content. Low bandwidth will simply not affect their business models, especially since the big bandwidth users are the streaming services, gaming, and Bittorrent in most of your resident's homes, If you've the expertise and equipment to even consider this kind of throttling, you should have some network monitors already in place to verify this claim, or you should be able to justify getting a loan of a network traffic monitor for just such analysis. And given the overwhelming bandwidth use of such high bandwidth applications, the relatively low bandwidth needs of textbooks and other critical student specific services won't even notice the loss of quality service unless you effectively block them.
If you block them entirely, the book publishers can call the FCC and contact the schools and their clients, and they _will_ get upset with you. They can also contact your upstream ISP, who will be very unhappy with you muscling into their bandwidth throttling "turf".
Hopefully they'll have plenty of pre-law students filing law suits on 1a grounds, unfair competition and whatever else they can think of as at will be A) good practice for them and, more importantly, B) costly for the property company.
Fuck those customers. Not like they can go anywhere else.
More money, and i'm not the bitchboy that has to answer the phone.
Win win all around. Bonuses for everyone but the dipshit taking the complaints!
There are so many reasons that colleges and universities should step way back from network monitoring but the best one I can think of to sell it to your school, is one of limiting liability. If the school is monitoring all network traffic and tying it to students, then they are totally responsible for any safety incidents that occur from a preventative standpoint. Legally speaking a victim of any crime could then sue the school if they failed to prevent anything. As it stands now a school is responsible for anything that happens on their grounds but they can't really be sued directly for something like Columbine, that I am aware of. If the network monitoring goes live and there are manifestos posted through the school internet that go unnoticed, then the school is going to be hit with massive lawsuits down the road... plus the expense of having to monitor that information.
Because from my perspective, paying an ISP to run traffic back and forth is CHEAP. Monitoring a network is VERY EXPENSIVE.
What's the payoff for schools? You might think it's some sinister reason, but I can assure you this is some very angry person in the IT dept or somewhere in the school who merely enjoys feeling powerful so they are pushing this kind of authoritarian agenda just to flex their muscles. There is not one shred of financial reasoning to take on all that insurance risk... and God forbid the insurance people find a loophole if shit goes down on the campus or even off campus.
Then you have your would-be novelists. Imagine what Tom Clancy's internet history looks like.
tl:dr; schools that follow any student's browsing habits become responsible for whatever that student does or APPEARS to do
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
You provide network access. If you restrict it in anyway you should be able to be sued at the very least for false advertising.
Screen on.
Hello, gentleman.
All your site belong to us.
You have no chance.
Make your deal . . .
Not a large amount of bandwidth involved. If I am a student there all I will do is activate the MyFi on my phone. Why breach a firewall when you can step around it?
Which I guess under the circumstances is pretty predictable.
I guess where I'd start is with the facts. I'd build a model for how much it would cost, additional staff needed, how much it would bring in, support (and under the circumstances enforcement) costs, what competitors the users could turn to, what the content providers would be willing to pay (if anything) etc. I wouldn't do the new business idea any favors; I'd be objective and hard-nosed about it as possible. If the new service selling your residents to content providers isn't going to be profitable, then the whole idea goes no farther.
It's a safe bet that the business wouldn't be as profitable as the directors think, simply because it's usually a lot harder to make money in an unfamiliar business than you hoped it would be. It's easy enough in the abstract to believe the new idea will be like printing money, but in fact you're still trying to get people to part with their money, which is going to cost you *your* money. And you think, "Gee we got 15,000 customers, we can charge content providers a pretty penny for access." But is 15000 so large a potential customer base that content providers will adjust to a new way of doing business just for *you*? The big guys like Apple and Netflix and Amazon will probably just laugh at you and leave you twisting slowly, slowly in the wind rather than pay you a dime and invite every two-bit Internet baron to shake them down too. So maybe contact some of the big guys and just ask them how much they'd be willing to pay up and what kinds of services they'd expect in return. Those services are important!!! It's usually the unanticipated support costs that kill gold-egg-laying IT geese.
As for the small guys, well, they probably don't have much money to cough up. But it'd still be worth contacting some local business that needs access to your 15000 customers and taking them for a test shakedown, just to show you were a good soldier and looked in the sofa cushions for loose change. That kind of pathetic detail often drives home the futility of a hare-brained scheme. People when they come up with a brainstorm like this imagine piles of money-for-nuthin rolling in, so a bit of a reality check is healthy.
In other words, I would start with due diligence before you contemplate waving the bloody shirt. If, against all expectation, the idea proves to be promising, well I'd discreetly get an idea how your existing customers will react to having some of the Internet sites they need throttled. Remember, you're dealing with the dream of money-for-nuthin. Your job, your responsibility to your employers is to show them what it will really cost them in money, headaches and reputation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Could you clarify a little what is currently happening? Based on some of the comments it seems that everyone has a different idea of what is CURRENTLY going on:
-The take I have is that you're saying that for now you've just been asked to EXPLORE POSSIBILITIES (ie, it's free unfestered access for now).
-I'm also a little confused regarding the court order blockages at the request of various copyright holders. Can you give examples of what is being done, how, why, when...? (refrain from giving names to protect the guil^H^H^H^Hinnocent copyright holders for fear of backlash).
-You indicate aprox 15k apartments across America. How are you giving access? Are these large residential complexes with a centralized large "pipe" to the 'net at each location and you have some sort of equivalent to a corporate campus-type distribution network? Do you have regular residential-grade ADSL modem things and they are individual apartments? A mixture of each? Can you give some insight?
As for the "lets charge the commercial service providers to access our network", it's very much the same argument that the larger ISPs want to use to justify elimination of net-neutrality, and giving better/speedier access to those providers that pay. From a PERSONAL view, I can't see why an ISP shouldn't have the RIGHT to decide which services it throttles or which it prioritizes, however I DO see it as an opportunity for ISP's to differentiate themselves from others "hey, come to us, we will make sure you have equal access to everything as opposed to ISP-non-neutral which makes it succky-slow for you to access google-youtube".
Those ISP's wanting to throttle/speed up depending who pays them more are (in my view) shooting themselves in the foot if they actually do it. It would only really work if they ALL do it, but if it's ALL of them, then they could be collectively accused of collusion or market-fixing...
Even if your management "says" that they are trying to get some money for it because they are providing it for free, they currently are NOT. If they are charging a fixed price which includes rent, taxes, water, electricity, laundry-room facilities, pool, library, parking-lot etc.... then the rent is paying for the total of all of those services. Internet access is a small part of that, but it IS a part. Management should figure out what their cost is and factor that into their calculations. Trying to sell access to your students for internet service providers wouldn't get big bucks in any case... You may get a bigger chunk trying to sell (for junk snail-mail advertising) the whole list/address of students updated on a regular basis (more bang for your buck!) than actually having to implement the limitations that you seem to imply (hard to do a complete BLOCKAGE of places like amazon -as you say- without suffering severe backlash, and clients either getting alternative providers, or converting your service in irrelevant).
A landlord can't say to UPS nice packages. It would be a shame if something happened to them before the tenants got em. Come let's talk? My uncle has a special insurance program to prevent accidents like this from happening.
That is extortion and interference with interstate commerce. Who the hell does Netflix have for their lawyers. ... Now for the poster mention liability costs. Netflix and the textbook companies won't take this standing down!
http://saveie6.com/
The apartment rental company has probably already determined that
1) The cost of separate billing for different internet options is too high to be worth doing
2) Most prospective renters don't really care about internet faster than 1 megabit/second.
In that case, I think prioritization, and/or blocking web sites is a good idea. Prospective renters that care, WILL ask about the internet connection before signing a contract. BE SURE TO ANSWER THAT INTERNET IS MEDIOCRE, because those people are not your target market, and you do not want them as renters.
I guess big entertainment is going to get their wish: A balkanized internet, with paywalls everywhere starting right at the premises. This isn't smart, but then neither is big entertainment. Arrogant, greedy, despicable, yes. Great creators of value, not so much. They're making money despite their stupidity, not because they're so SMRT. I really do wish courts (and politicians) were smarter than to allow corporates to censor citizens, certainly not wholesale.
Personally I'd say this approach is highly abusive of your position as ISP. The only thing you could meaningfully do here, without opening cans of worms I'm amazed anyone would want to ever open that is, is to split out the "last mile" and the service part.
Companies such as packet front* produce kit that lets you do just that: Your tenants get ethernet delivered, but that's not internet service; for that they need to pay some ISP. The hardware allows multiple ISPs to use your infrastructure to serve their customers.
You could then set up an ISP that provides butchered service, like a facebook-and-twitter-only-special, or something comparably assassine. This is apparently the future for "developing countries". People who gush about it seem particularly hateful --cleverly disguised as samaritan-- toward the people who have no other choice.
The foremost problem is the captivity. You do care about that because it diminishes the value of your appartments, even if you spout "9x.y% of the people only want $foo (and nothing else)" and like nonsense.
Personally I'd get the split infrastructure, then do a deal with internet2 and connected universities to give enrolled students high quality high speed research networking access yet allow non-elegible tenants to pay for some other (fully fledged and on the cheap, thank you) service instead.
You only do the last mile maintenance, don't have to play ISP, don't get stuck for transit costs, and perhaps get some dosh from ISPs for allowing them to offer service on your infrastructure. But really, the dosh is optional; the high-quality access itself already adds value to the appartments and thus increases the quality of your tenants, lowering costs, and all that. In fact, a adding a concurrently-accessible local-only network would be a great vehicle for community building.
If you think about it a bit, it's a good example of how $-signs stuck in your eyes can easily cause you to earn less in the long term. You should be in it for the tenants, not for the profit maximisation**.
* That declined to hire me, natch. In fact wouldn't even talk to me at all. Luckily there are more companies that make comparable machinery.
** Which is a bad idea anyway, see the works of the late big name management writer Peter Drucker.
... and they will flee. If those who provide services are charged more, they will pass those costs to the students. If the students are forced to pay more, they'll do their online ordering on free wifi at the coffee shop, (and look for a cheaper place to live). By providing network access, you are providing a useful service that enhances the appeal of you rentals. Diminish the quality or value of that service, and you diminish the value of your rental.
I suppose this restriction will be mentioned in the rent contact, right? Because I would not count this sort of service as "internet" access and I would have to go to another ISP for the real thing, provided that it's not against the terms and conditions of the rent contract, in which case I would look for another apartment. It better be an otherwise kick ass apartment in order to persuade ageek to live there, unless your target group is something else.
Do some research and come up with a very long and/or expensive shopping list of equipment that needs to be bought.
Heck, it might cost $1million or double that in new equipment.
Give that to the PHBs and see if they think that they can get a return on it.
How exactly do you plan on doing this? Would you block access by default and only allow a whitelist of sites that have paid your ransom to allow access? Or would you only block sites that you've targeted as "sites that we want to pay us" and then only unblock them when they've paid? And what technical methods would you use for blocking?
How would you select which companies you'd like to pay you, and how would you approach them? Like would you block Amazon? And if so, is your plan to just email their customer service and say, "Yo, we want you to pay us to allow access for 35k students!" Because you'd need contacts within the company to hope to broker a deal. Who's going to negotiate the deal? And I'll tell you what, it'll be a tough negotiation because, even assuming you have enough prospective consumers to get their attention, you'd be asking them to set a very dangerous precedent. Smaller companies might be stupid enough and short-sighted enough to make that kind of agreement, but they're not going to have enough money to make the whole venture worthwhile.
And now, lets assume that you've created an appropriate system and signed a deal with the businesses you're interested in. Who are you going to get to monitor and maintain this system? That's going to cost money too. Add up the money you're going to pay out to create this system, to broker the deals, to monitor/maintain/enforce the system. Is that amount of money substantially less than the money you're making from all this?
Putting aside questions of whether it's moral or appropriate, I just don't see how you would pull it off.
Given that your job is to protect the company from making loss as much as help it make profit, you can quite safely say no. For starters it's a legal quagmire because it's tied into rent, this gets a multiplier if you are a multi state operation, I imagine getting a legal opinion in every state you operate is going to cost you. Plus the time to maintain it, and that added service desk calls. Add to that how much it would cost to successfully defend at least one class action lawsuit by an ambitious college legal clinic and subtract the profit from the (small scale) contracts. You will most likely get a negative number. There's also likely to be a hit to your tenants goodwill, that's hard to put a price on but also financially important, unhappy tenants leave apartments in worse states when they leave.
Your gut tells you what a giant bad move this is. And like it's been said earlier your tenants that figure this out will quickly bring their own access.
The real question is how to present this to a bunch of executives without using the term "dick move." I regularly present to IT folks and executives and it wouldn't be hard to throw a big bucket of water on this. I'd imagine a short presentation that leads with "You can do this but your shouldn't."
The technical part of the presentation is easy enough Explain in simple terms that just limiting the internet access given to the apartments won't work since internet access through smart phones, iPads and other devices is so common. So is leaching (drive-by access to open ports) and free access at places like Starbucks, Paneara, etc. Use the word "porous." It might help to use an example like how people regularly circumvent various national efforts to do this (e.g. Great Firewall of China, Iran, Syria, etc.).
Second, and most important, it should be explained how doing this will damage their reputation and lead to decreasing occupancy rates. Sure, this may work for one semester but social media -- everything from Facebook to Yelp to Twitter -- will rapidly warn potential tenants that they'd be renting from a dictatorship. A short description of the Streisand Effect may help. And end with the "While this is technically possible..." section with inflated costs and also the costs of what would mean fighting an ongoing war with clever students with more time than money. But the bottom line should be that while it may be possible that it would be bad businss. It would decease their occupancy rate, damage their reputation on social media and cost them money to engage with a smart enemy (of their making) with an effective technical community dedicated to circumventing this restriction.
Of course, it would be paramount to know why this asinine idea came up in the first place. Are the booksellers paying them to do this? Is Amazon? If so that may be collusion and if you can accurately document this (please ask to see emails and/or potential legal agreements) you could make money as a whistleblower. Just a thought.
The BOD must think it is comparable to selling lists of phone numbers to telemarketers, but the internet doesn't work that way. The total college student population in the US is of order 20 million - how are they going to get companies to pay attention to a diddly-squat ISP that wants to control access to 35,000 - 0.2% of the potential market?
Let's assume you could get $10 per resident in payments from your "customers" -- that's $350,000k per year.
Is that even enough to pay for the networking gear and integration necessary to implement your filtering? Management/monitoring/configuration?
It seems like making it worthwhile would require $100 per resident, and I don't see how large vendors (Netflix) would ever pay that much for a relatively small population, and it's too much for niche sites for whom your residents are a larger portion of their customer base.
It would be one thing if it was a single site, but you're talking multiple sites all over the country. That's a lot of BS for the return on your investment.
That's what I told them everyone would tell us if we started pushing the idea. But, they don't pay me for my initial reactions.
I've delegated a lot of work to look at implementation costs, and what has flowed back up to me is that they are not that high. However, what I don't have the expertise to gauge are the ongoing costs like lawsuits and such. Our inside counselors are mostly real estate law professionals with a few commercial litigators and my feedback from them has been mostly pages filled with question marks.
We provide "network access" as part of rent, not "Internet Access." Students are free to use other means such as cellular modems to access the Internet if they do not agree with our ToS, but for the vast majority of them, the network we provide with filtered access to the Internet is sufficient for their needs. The rest of our "network" are basically various Intranet sites they can use to pay rent, order maintenance, report problems with utilities or grounds, manage their lease, and manage Bursar DirectPay, where their rent is paid directly from student loan proceeds received by the school, or Parent DirectPay, where rent is billed directly to their parents via ACH or credit card payment.
In any case, I intend to give the board an honest assessment, even though I think this is a terrible idea. I hope to God they don't decide to force this steaming pile of shit upon me.
Look at what you're meant to be providing: The access to the internet that they've already paid for, yet you're blocking sites that people would normally get with other ISPs, and so could reasonably expect access to with yours.
If you go ahead with this, you need to split the internet out of the rent, and specify in your contract up-front that you're blocking exactly those services that sudents are most likely to need. If you don't you're at least morally and also probably legally in the wrong to even advertise it as "internet access included"
Look at who you are targetting. Students. Exactly the group most likely to:
a: Need full value for money.
b: Be filled with (justified) righteous indignation and protest most vocally in a unified way.
c: Find a way around it (e.g. use coffeeshop internet instead, or more likely find some way to hack it, eg. its acutally simple to find/use a proxy). The fact that thats exactly what people in countries with oppressive governments have to do will be used to make your comapny look like psycopathic idiots.
d: Fire off a lawsuit driven by legal students (i.e. start a legal war of attrition that not only doesn't cost them anything to fight, they might even get course credits for)
e: Complain en masse to the universities, who will in turn come down on your company and directly cost you future business.
I think extortion is extortion.
As a landlord, there are other considerations too, depending if your tenants have the option to not pay for your "lack-of-service", or reduce the rent by the amount alternatives cost them, how it is described to them, and the laws of the individual state, it might even negate their legal requirement to pay full rent.
Landlords aren't often permitted to prevent tenants from obtaining services. Courts don't tend to favor entities trying to obstruct students' abilities to obtain learning resources.
(1) implement the Board of Director's idea as-is;
(2) encourage the Board (and anybody else who supports the idea) that they need to really market the hell out of it;
(3) at the same time create a series of spurious emails to the project backers telling them what a terrible idea the project is;
(4) stay home and watch the news the day that the system goes live;
(5) watch as the villagers storm the company castle and the board of directors (and associated greedy imbeciles) are summarily tossed out on their pointy heads;
(6) return to a company which is now free of these fools;
(7) profit!
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
I work for a municipality with 10 million residents and I've been tasked with exploring the idea that in return for city services that we restrict access to certain churches willing to pay us for enhanced access to the residents. I'm wondering what slashdot thinks of this idea
Many folks see 15,000 and think they'll get a high proportion of subscribers.
When every college kid these days has a smart phone with 3G internet access, free wifi at every business around them and at school, there would be absolutely no reason for the kids to pay their apartment complex for network access.
The exceptions would be the kids who do a lot of gaming and streaming of TV shows. And if they are subscribing to cable, they should already have internet access.
There are 15,000 apartments across America. So, each complex will have to have their own infrastructure - overhead.
Then there needs to be support - more overhead. There will have to be at least one network guy or outsourced company to handle it.
tl;dr: Just quickly doing the numbers in my head and using a very optimistic subscription rate of 10% (1,500 apartments across America subscribe), I see this losing money; let alone making anything.
The break even point will have to be figured. A test complex somewhere would help in getting an idea of the subscription rates.
And as far as local businesses are concerned, it wouldn't be worth it. We all have been burned by Yellow Pages and other companies giving us pie in the sky promises about how advertising with them will "boost business".
15,000 apartments is is nothing to national businesses. They want to hit millions or at least hundreds of thousands of kids and Google and others are much more effective at that.
It's a clever idea (like Comcast wanting Netflix to pay them for what Comcast's own customers pay them already).
Right now you have 15,000 paying customers. They are almost "captive" in the sense that they get Internet service without having to put any effort into it, so they will continue to be customers so long as you treat them fairly.
Your customers pay you to give them access to the whole Internet. If you remove parts of the net until someone else double-pays you for that same service, you'll find yourself on the wrong side of a Judge certifying a class-action suit against you for lots of fun things like breach of contract, tortious interference, and possibly material misrepresentation (not fraud - fraud isn't covered by E&I insurance).
Your safe bet if you wanted to do something this stupid is to give your 15,000 customers FREE Internet with the caveat that some sites may not be reachable unless the other side pays for it. This would be legal, but it won't be financially profitable.
So you can either retain a sustainable model where you're not getting sued, not extorting third parties, and making money, OR you can extort third parties and likely get sued OR you can move to a financially non-sustainable model.
As an IT director I guess your job is to figure out how to implement what the Directors wants. As anyone with half a brain I would recommend they make the selection from the choices above before spending a minute researching firewalls and private-dickhead-networks.
E
It won't work. Some students will use cell phone modems and others will set up VPN connections to the outside and absolutely nobody would access any of the paid for content directly. For some enlightenment, introduce your board members to the TOR Browser Bundle: https://www.torproject.org/pro... Even airports, which have the ultimate captive audience, are now going free and open - for example the Vienna airport. So, you will have a whole shitload of schlepp and no hope in hell of making any money.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You've also not factored in the security problem of 15,000 irritated students, perhaps 1% of which will have students capable of mounting security assaults on your infrastructure, with no pity for you from the other 99%. Prepare to have your routers, your databases, your proxies, your web sites, and your personal email and accounts rectally probed with a corn cob, with *no* sympathy from your other clients. If the crackers take down your sites, the bursar and the parents are going to stuff *your* head up your own rectum for agreeing to this. Not the board of directors: *you*, because your name is there as the IT director who implemented this. Also before you pull this stunt, be aware that filtering content this way means you give up any pretense of "common carrier" or free speech defenses for not filtering *everything*. You can leave yourself vulnerable to the legal costs of not having filtered content *before* getting a court order.
> We provide "network access" as part of rent, not "Internet Access."
> the network we provide with filtered access to the Internet is sufficient for their needs.
The parents or students will introduce you, personally, to the concept of "my lawyer can snort your lawyer like the blow on his secretary's tits". this is not going to be pretty.
If you do that to law students, you'll end up with a bunch of people fascinated by the law, advised by a world class lawyer (one of their professors) suing for the experience.
If you do it to technical students, they'll set up a proxy in one of the computer labs.
If you do it to party students, they'll seal a nice cake into one of the walls as revenge when they leave, then they'll borrow the techies proxy.
The booksellers won't even talk to you. They know the students will get around it.
At best you will be an annoyance, an invonvenience. Every college student already has numerous alternatives (Cellular Data Plan, Campus Wi-Fi, Local Coffee Shop, Friends, VPN). All you need is one college student to implement a workaround and that solution will quickly spread. And, any premium your free internet access adds to your rental units could be at jeopardy. May be more trouble thatn its worth.
You could waste many hours calculating how much it would cost (equipment, maintenance, support calls, unsatisfied customers, risk of legal actions, etc.). After spending a lot of time on this, you could most probably demonstrate it's a bad business idea.
But why bother? I'm sure you have more interesting things to do than writing a memo to explain in detail why a stupid idea is stupid.
It is also pretty obviously a bad idea from an "ethical" point of view. You don't have to spend hours doing boring research to explain that. You can just explain it.
Maybe most of the board will understand it straight away (if they didn't already when one of them suggested it). If not, then you don't want to work for these people.
So after explaining to them why you think it is a bad idea, just say you will not help implement it because you feel it's not ethically acceptable. If most of the board people are smart, they will appreciate your clear point of view. If not, they will show you the door, and you will be grateful for being forced to leave these idiots.
Could it be that a single idiot on the board came up with the idea, and that the rest of the board didn't want to discuss it and just asked you to "write a memo" to get rid of the subject?
SPAMing looked like a good idea too. Back in the 90s I saw a lot of people jumping on the SPAM bandwagon. "It costs nothing and delivers our message to so many people." Yet SPAM was instantly widely despised and utterly hated. Anyone using it commercially rapidly discovered it was NEGATIVE ADVERTISING. Rather than adding business, it cost business.
You are about to make the same mistake. No one will want to live in your rentals after you do. Even 10 or 20 years down the line folks will still remember what you tried to do, and avoid renting from you. Hell, folks still avoid TurboTax due to their "copy protection" that overwrote LILO and prevented computers from booting back in the day, and how many years has Intuit been apologizing for that now?
On the technical side of things, Netflix and Youtube make up half of all internet traffic, and it's somewhat real-time. Is there anyone who's making up half of your customers internet traffic, and who can't deal with overnight downloading? I didn't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Stop using economic terms you don't understand. This is a business decision in a competitive market. It's probably a lousy business decision that will anger customers and lead to loss of revenue, but it's still just a business decision. If you don't like it, don't do business with them, nobody is forcing you.
I don't know what is worse, your company's idea or the fact you thought asking Slashdot would be a good course of action. Are you going to go back to your bosses and say "Well, I don't like this, and Slashdot doesn't. so..."?
I don't get what you're expecting to receive here, adulation for being some kind of whistle-blower? How about taking a stand, and quitting your obviously horrible job and THEN posting here? Because anything other than that means you're just going to do it anyway, which makes me lack any respect for you at all.
the board of directors has just made comcast and cox look good by comparison :(
unless you started paying residents to use your network, it's a bad, dishonest idea.
If you actually block legit sites unless those sites pay you for access.
1 they will go off campus for access when they need it
2 if any of those schools are or have a brother/sister college that "does law" they will spin up a Class Action Lawsuit in DAYS
In short if you like what a chicken looks like after being sucked into the engines of a C-5 then go ahead and BE THE CHICKEN!!
Safer would be to make sure than "friendly sites" are always fast.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Your customers definitely believed they would receive internet access paid for from their rent, and if you change that while still holding to a lease it will upset them. Legalistic mumbo jumbo like claiming they paid for "network access" rather than internet access would't actually fly in court if you ever do face a class action lawsuit or FTC complaint about this. The expectation you intended for your customer is what matters, not your ridiculous word games. Most students would probably be too busy with other things to take action over this, so if your tenants really are all students you won't face civil action.
But this kind of move is bad for other reasons. The bad blood it will generate between you and your customers will incur other kinds of costs as your customers act out passive-aggressively against you, in the form of poor yelp reviews, poor word of mouth, and deliberate property destruction. This is just the kind of short-sighted nonsense I've come to expect from many businessmen. Absolutely no conception of the big picture. Providing this access is very inexpensive, and you said you'd do it when you rented the apartments. By changing it up you are saying to your customers that you don't value their time and that you don't take them seriously. You just want to use them to extort money from someone else.
Moreover, this action is not sustainable. If you and enough others to this, you will be seeing net neutrality and other consumer protection regulations in the future as a result. Most college students don't stay in college forever.
You will piss them off by saying you think it's a bad idea. The best thing to do is research other examples where a company or college or airport or coffee shop tried to restrict access like this, and what the results were. How much revenue did they get? Were there added costs for more it support? At the end of the day, was it worth it? Call them case studies, executives love that shit.
I bet that they'll remember that they're a rental company, not a cutting edge ISP, and they don't want to be in the vanguard on this issue. If they are smart businessmen they'll play to their strengths.
Don't most colleges and universities provide VPN access to their students?
... you have 15,000 students, and you're hoping to give them access to just some of the internet, in the hopes that they'll buy textbooks from whatever shitty overpriced group you've cut a deal with instead of Amazon?
Students have:
1) time
2) idealism
3) skills
and the combination of those three, if you piss them off, will rip you a new one. The techies will set up proxies to get around your bullshit (and they will succeed), the law students will sue you, and the business majors will set up a "white market" (not black at all!) reselling books to their peers for a small profit.
This is the same post everyone else is writing, because this is one of the few times that Slashdot's all saying the same thing: this is a fucking bad idea.
Rent-seeking
Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers. Classic examples of rent-seeking, a phrase coined by an economist, Gordon Tullock, include:
a protection racket, in which the gang takes a cut from the shopkeeper's PROFIT;
a CARTEL of FIRMS agreeing to raise PRICES;
a UNION demanding higher WAGES without offering any increase in PRODUCTIVITY;
lobbying the GOVERNMENT for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers or some other rivals.
Whether legal or illegal, as they do not create any value, rent-seeking activities can impose large costs on an economy.
Source The Economist Magazine Dictionary of Economic Terms. I can cite many other sources, but I'm posting this from a phone so you can Google them yourself.
The Wikipedia article is about the rent seeking as described in Anne Kreuger's well-known 1974 paper. However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree that 35K users are not a statistically significant sample on a national scale. It may be possible that with adequate market segment size of renters in smaller geographic regions the numbers would be telling. (and compelling to a business associate) If you were upfront and explained that the free (included internet) had monitoring, redirection, and limitations included you shouldn't get in trouble. I don't know if you could achieve any economy of scale to compete with Comcast/AT&T, and they may even be one of your installed carriers... These monopolies have invested heavily in "Big Data" collection of their customer base and have their infrastructure installed in millions of homes today. So you could possibly partner with the big fish and provide some supplemental meta data upstream and lower your connection costs. In return if it's structured as a reciprocal agreement these partners may be willing to share their gathered intelligence with your organization.
Sure, you could do something like this technically with little trouble. The issues here, over and above moral, are legal and business.
Is this illegal? Maybe, but I really hope you at least have to inform the residents and it could not take effect until after current leases run out.
And what sort of long term profit change should you expect by degradating your service to existing customers and offering less for future customers?
Also, is 35K enough clout to even have anyone with any money to listen to you (and suffer the horrendous press along with you).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Has anybody actually been stupid enough to try this before?
Never underestimate the anger of 15k people on social media and how much damage the can inflict on your property. Wait until they go around doing something trivial like opening up A/C lines form the HVAC systems and burning out the compressors at a few thousand dollars a piece.
I tried something similar to this idea back in the very late 1990s without the blocking and other BS described in your idea. It ended up not happening, but here are some particulars to note from the experience:
1. Adding the cost of install and continued maintenance and upgrades to the rent is sensible and a good model for an "internal" private network for each complex. But, and this is the big one that killed the project, the big providers will still be able to do it cheaper over the existing phone and cable infrastructure. They may charge more for the monthly service, but the overall infrastructure costs get spread over a much wider base than just your complexes.
2. The big boys will still need to provide your outside pipe. If you have a few hundred people per complex your bandwidth needs are going to be tremendous in today's market and they are going to price you out of business faster than your paper calculations can predict.
3. The big boys will be able to upgrade services faster than you. Your infrastructure WILL fall behind or your rents will go up to try to match and your occupancy will drop like a rock causing pricing to further go up per unit and, bang, you are out of business again.
4. Filtering to keep bandwidth down (I guess that would be one reason to do it, the financial one) would be suicide. Mentioned numerous times above. The big boys don't filter, can offer new services on a faster curve and have to supply you with the pipe everyone goes through anyway, so again bad.
On paper the idea seems sound. A lot of bad ideas start off that way. Due to the nature of the real world the idea quickly crumbles to dust in practice, and by that time a large sum of money has been spent with no hope of recovery. If the OP wants to discuss this further in more detail I would be glad to make private contact. The filtering aside, it still won't fly. m-u-l-t-i-m-e-d-i-a-v-t at google mail, minus the dashes.
I'm back at my computer so here you go:
"Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers" -- The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Rowley, Charles, Schneider, Friedrich (Eds.), Springer-Verlag 2003.
"Definition of 'Rent-Seeking' When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation." -- Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/te..., Accessed June 1 2014.
"The idea that resources are unproductively used in rent-seeking contests has much broader application than the original rent-seeking papers suggested[emphasis mine] The rent-seeking logic has been applied to issues in history, sociology, anthropology, biology and philosophy. The core has also been formalized and analyzed more rigorously, using the tools of modern game theory. The modern rent-seeking literature describes the rational decision to invest in contesting pre-existing wealth or income, rather than undertaking productive activity. [emphasis mine]" -- Congleton, Roger D., Arye L. Hillman, and Kai A. Konrad. "Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview." The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research 1 (2008).
In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.
Oh, yes, and one more citation for you:
"prig (n.): a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner." -- "prig." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Jun. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.co...>.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here is my take and I'm not a lawyer.
1) I think you are grossly underestimating the complexity of doing this. Most commercial sites are very complex to analyze in terms of traffic sources. For example my stupid commercial website which runs about 100 visitors a month now has chunks of akamai (millions of potential IP addresses) because I bought a service that throws that in. That's in addition to people setting up all sorts of proxies. What you are talking about is a secure network. A secure network has to mostly assume that almost all users aren't trying to actively subvert it and that there is a big staff and complex infrastructure to monitor all the activity to catch those places where it being actively subverted. You don't have control of physical access to the network. You have a population of college students who are going to be actively subverting your security. I don't think you will be able to pull this off and if you did the costs would be astronomical, far greater than you'll ever generate in revenue.
Just start thinking about preventing active subversion. For example you can't have point to point traffic all traffic has to go through a firewall and all firewalls are going to need event analysis so that you can figure out what the users are doing. Your $1200 switches are now $30k at least.
2) But let's assume I were wrong. The big issue is you are no longer a common carrier. You know:
a) Charge people for access via rent i.e. they are subscribers.
b) Charge people for access to your to your subscribers.
Which means you are publisher not a common carrier. That makes you liable for the content. That makes you liable for copyright. That makes you liable for obscenity. That make you potentially criminal liable for things like drugs. All the legal protections that a typical ISP has because they don't discriminate disappear because you do discriminate.
3) On top of all that. What is your cost of sales and support? You are going to have to approach places on the internet, negotiate and cut custom contracts. What are your users worth per head. Google maybe says they are worth $1 / mo / ea for total access, but you can't allow total access for subversion. Moreover most of the Google links won't work. So you just sell search to collect more data and say Google says that's worth $.10 / mo / ea. OK... Can you negotiate the contract, setup custom filters that allow Google search to work and maintain those. Remember you are now selling this service so you not Google are liable for making it work. What does that cost? What is the cost of sales for the 5 contracts that didn't go through to land this one $3500 / mo contract? And that's close to best case.
When hippies attack. Film at 11.
If I were a student living in one of the rental units, I would want to a) disconnect from restricted access network, b) have the cost credited to me in the form of lower rent, and c) get my own unfiltered Internet access. I think I would even be willing to go to court over it, and maybe even make it a class-action lawsuit.
I would feel the same way if the rental units provided cable TV service, but chose to limit access to certain freely available channels (i.e., local terrestrial broadcast stations), or of the rental units provided a shared FM antenna system but chose to restrict or control access to certain FM radio frequencies.
Whether the FCC has gotten around to making it legally so or not, access to the Internet should be provided as a common carrier service. The intermediaries (such as the rental company in this case) should not be able to try to get a cut of the action above and beyond simply recovering the cost of the service in the rent.
That's my opinion, however. I'm sure others have their own. What the people who control the rental units should bear in mind is that others may share my opinion, and if enough of them do it could get very sticky for them. Restraining people's access to freely available media doesn't go over well.
Just as many companies have done when interfered with by the government... you should terminate services that the government presumes to control that they have no right to control.
It is your bundling of services that apparently allows them to do this... were the students contracting with ATT or Verizon or whatever for their ISP service they would be treated as normal users and not subjected to additional restrictions on their network access. It is only because you provide these services that this has been allowed to happen.
The ethical thing in this situation is to stop providing those services. Inform all representative government officials responsible for areas you operate in that government law has forced this response. And then help your tenants get internet service separately.
It is not acceptable that your users be subjected to this level of control whether or not it is by court order. Utterly unacceptable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Seriously. Instead of dicking with marketing firms and network-based rebuttal, how about jacking the rent up another $30 for each resident? $30 * 35K is over $1M dollars of guaranteed, no-bullshit, no-middleman profit. EVERY MONTH.
Whoohoo!
do() || do_not();
They are FORCING their tenants to pay for the access to the internet (whether they want it or not) and now they want to turn around and FORCE the internet to pay for access to their tenants?
I won't be the students running the class action, it will be the more wealthy parents who have time, money and venom to ensure their kids education needs (at an already expensive education system) are met.
I'd say that instead of limiting access your company should create a portal marketplace that features additional presence for the featured or college friendly vendors to your student audience. Providing a high speed local server that is full of additional evn exclusive content is something that the vendors you have identified should be interested in.
OP here. I wasn't trying to be glib, I actually started several reasoned posts, but the more I thought about it, the surer I was that I did not want to think about it. Hence the one liner. I was here when we lost the battle and IP slowly but surely transformed from Imaginary to Intellectual property. Now, all the shit we had been warning about has come to fruition, and then some. It just really, really sucks to see us once again on the cusp of defeat.
Walled gardens and throttled asymmetric pipes. The dream is turning into a nightmare.
It's a horrible and a sample of things that could potentially come in the future.
That is exactly why I say do it. Implement it, and implement it well. The blow back will hopefully be huge and act as a precedent, both in a legal sense and a more informal sense where the entities trying to do it get hit hard in PR and profits.
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
Why would you block sites at the request of Copyright holders? I mean they wouldn't normally get a court order to request you to not access their sites, right? And if it's another site.. I don't know. I can understand then suing someone for accessing thepiratebay or something and downloading their movie or software illegally - but handing out court orders to small apartment ISPs to block sites seems odd. (And if it's not a court order, I would ignore them).
Anyway, I am not sure that the powers that be intended, but I can see one of three options:
1. You have some sort of annoying portal that interferes with the internet and spams residents somehow to push services that have paid you money.
2. You block certain popular services and demand the content providers pay you to unblock them so that people can access them. (A kind of blackmail)
3. You add some sort of actually value added services and let the residents know about them.
So #1 will just piss people off and probably not make anyone much money.
As far as #2 goes, 99% of places like Amazon, etc. would just ignore anything you sent them (or threaten to sue you), and the residents would be pissed. Internet access doesn't mean "access to some sites we felt like providing". Most will probably go to other providers ASAP if you do that. To the extent that the service is provided in the rent, the attractiveness of the apartments themselves will decrease since residents will be paying for shit service.
For #3, this would actually cost money, though it could make money in the long term through various strategies. For example, provide file servers proxy servers that people can use and your internet costs may go down while resident's access speeds go up.
I don't think so. Professors don't generally care how much the publishers or book stores make, so they recommend the book they like. Sometimes it's a book they themselves wrote, and so they make more money, though. The main issue is that the figure "College is expensive, what's $200 for a text book? It'll be included in their student loan or daddy will pay for it, so so what?" Eventually it all adds up though, and this is the same ind of thinking that has inflated medical costs in the US as well, though.
erm, but to be sure most of the money the apartment makes is not on the Internet...
I don't get it.
For me it would be a strong argument against choosing this accommodation. Especially since it may not be permitted to get a DSL as an alternative, so one can choose between content-based filtering and the data caps of wireless. To avoid losing technical students to other accommodation, I think they should allow the studends to pay for full internet access at a reasonable price.
1) Your company writes a letter to Amazon saying "if you want access to our tenants, you must pay us."
2) Amazon writes back "fuck you."
3) You spend time and money implementing a way to block your tenants' access to Amazon.
4) Your tenants are unhappy, and demanding rent reductions, because your comany is no longer living up to its part of the rental agreement.
5) Amazon couldn't care less. Their customers will find other ways to reach them: proxies, cellphones, internet cafés...
Everybody loses.
Your employer is a being composed of concentrated evil O_O
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There are so many problems with this, I don't even know where to start. I guess we will go in chronological order.
When you say they want to "privatize" your network. If it's owned by the Rental company, it's already private.
If you are providing this as part of the rental agreement, then you CAN'T just change it on the fly. You have a contractual obligation, and the contract is binding on ALL parties. If I lived there, you would be in court very quickly for that alone.
"and charge certain commercial entities for access to our residents." What exactly do you mean by this? What kind of access are you granting those comercial entities? I assume you are only talking about the network (which is bad enough). but understand if you provided them any kind of access to the Internet, on any level, they have some reasonable degree of expectation of privacy, between them and other entities such as banks, email, chat rooms, etc. etc. There are wiretap laws where your "comercial entities" along with the rental company, property owner, and yourself can all be named as accessories in some serious crimes. In addition to that, their individual domain begins in their home, and any access to their computer could be viewed as espionage.
When you say you block access by court order. I find that statement to be very suspect. Can you produce a copy of the court order? Just because somebody else tells you that you are restricted by court order, or just because police were to tell you that, does not make it true, and in most cases it's made up. If it's true, then you would receive a copy of the court order from the court. Copyright holders can only initiate DMCA notices and that only applies to those that HOST copyright information.
You did one thing right; you asked the Slashdot community for input. My recommendation is that you show your boses how unethical and unreasonable it is, and if they insist, then you should walk away from that position and the post the details of that rental property so people here can send THEM legal notices.
Okay, this is ethically wrong, but it's still a technically interesting solution so I feel obligated to share it anyway. Amazon has this whole referral thing: someone clicks your link to get to Amazon, anything they buy on that visit you get like 5-10% of. Just hijack that referral so that every visit to Amazon from your network is associated with a referral from your corporate account. I've heard of companies doing this in the past with some success.
They think they want to block it.
Let's start out with they'll be paying for access, then adding fees on *top* of that to the residents.
Are they going to provide their own cell repeaters, for all companies, to prevent the kids from using their cell phones?
And then, many of these kids will be knowledgable. Do they really imagine that folks who've seen people get around the government in China and the middle east aren't going to get around this? Wait for the first one to set up a server, have everyone else vpn into it, and connect via a laser link to someone nearby in line-of-sight.
Now, if the kids hadn't been brainwashed for the last 30 years... back in the sixties or seventies, we'd have organized, and set up a rent strike. Oh, and even so, I'd be *really* surpised if none of them talked to real lawyers.
Your management is being mindbogglingly ignorant and greedy.
mark
I think they're jockeying to be next in line for CEO of Comcast...
You are jumping into a pool full of sharks with lawyers.
This attempt will likely bind your company to ridiculous constraints, with little if any profit, and really offend your occupants.
Try to tell your bosses to focus on the things under your control to improve the life of your undergraduate customers. They might even remember you after they graduate. Perhaps even positively.
Consider your clientel - young, tech savvy, maybe not as ethically limited as many might wish. Do your bosses really think they can't end-run around any deals to screw them for a few pennnies?
--
I've got a life. I just can't remember what directory it's in.
I think you're ignoring that the university generally profits directly from the textbook sales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
It's ironic that in this case it is a group of landlords looking to do this.
It _will_ backfire - horribly.
Tenants will bypass your filters, bad press will result in reduced desirability of the properties.
The Internet sees censorship or filters as blockages and finds ways around them.
Bottom line - you will badly hurt goodwill (as a manager you should know the value of this intangible) and probably result in a long term spiral of the company into lower profitability and quality of tenant (those who can afford to rent elsewhere, will do so).
Whoever came up with this idea is the same kind who think that spamming billions of people on their dime (cost shifted advertising) to make a couple of hundred sales is a good idea.
Depending on the ISP(s), this type of behaviour might be prohibited by the ISP(s) that are providing services at each of the complexes, as would charging individual tenants for the access and numerous other activities.
Typically even in a dedicated line most providers are OK to let you provide access on a straightforward "as-is as part of the rent" basis but they might interpret such meddling and the additional revenue generated as charging for a service that isn't technically theirs to charge for; so the company in question might want to check the T&C in each of their upstream contracts (eg does the contract permit reselling of bandwidth) before their upstream provider(s) lawyer up and sue for breach of contract.
If, on the other hand, the company has assets like it's own ASN/IP space/FCC registration (and purchases from a non-competing provider such as like Level3 with permission to resell the bandwidth in the contract), then this whole thing might be a different story.
(This information is based on my own experiences running dedicated fiber lines from other some large ISPs and provide access to similar complexes in college towns in a few different states and discussions with various providers in each state).
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Smartphones can surely be used to ignore your access by using them as wifi hotspots (that don't cost them extra). It's ridiculous how students, trying to better themselves and make a better citizenry, keep getting screwed by every capitalist a-hole on the planet. You try to siphon their pockets through your access, so shall they ignore it by its dis-ingenuousness. The student loans they pay are painful enough as it is, screw their idea and show them that if they weren't trying to screw the students the students would have nothing but good things to say and they look for things good since most are out to screw them already!
I think this is a great idea. I am sick and tired of the news being dominated by Khardashians, Brangelina and an election 2+ years off. Give me corporate venality vs college-age DIY terrorism for a few months. Take it from me, popcorn futures is where you want to move your IRA investments while this plays out. PLEASE do this.
--- Say something clever. Pretend it was me. Thanks.
I love it. It's so obviously profit motivated (in ways that are more clear than netflix type scenarios), and the people affected are the perfect demograph (just trying to get college kids).
Please do this; it will provide everyone the necessary ammunition to show that net neutrality is important to avoid people doing things as bad for society as what you've just proposed.