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?"
My read is that their intent is a little more targeted: find 10-15 companies that specifically target college students with online services like textbook rental, and find some way to siphon off a portion of those companies' revenue stream in return for "delivering" them access to the 15k users. Then leave the rest of the web unfiltered. This is essentially the model of net-non-neutrality ISPs have been using with Netflix, but in a "softer" sense, where it isn't actually blocked, but service is degraded. They leave most sites alone (because there's no money in them), and go after a handful of potential cash cows for a cut of the revenue.
My guess is that this company saw what ISPs have been doing with Netflix, and wonder if it's possible to do with other sectors than video streaming, too. It's harder to do with non-bandwidth-intensive sites, though. An ISP can soft-block Netflix by just degrading the access, and even have some plausible deniability (blame Netflix's ISP or servers for the poor performance), which some people will believe. But a textbook rental site doesn't need streaming HD video levels of bandwidth, so you might have to block them entirely to make this scheme work. And people will notice/complain about that much more.
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