Joe wrote: >Getting back to the OP's message, I keep having these visions of the >castrated "Internet" access some hotels provide. You know the ones. >The ones where everything goes through a Web proxy and you're forced >to have IE6 as a browser. For some people, who just want to log on >to Yahoo or Hotmail or whatever to check their e-mail, that's fine. >However, some of us might want to be able to VNC somewhere, or do >VoIP, or run a VPN connection... these are all well-known Internet >capabilities, and yet some providers of so-called "Internet" access >at hotels haven't allowed for them. > >Do we really want to spread that sort of model to the rest of the >Internet? All it really encourages is for more and more things to >be ported to HTTP, including, amusingly, management of devices... >at which point we have not really solved the problem but we have >succeeded at doing damage to the potential of the Internet.
Yes, taking away the mechanisms will result in a "castrated" Internet experience for the clueful ones which is why I don't think this can be a one-size-fits-all model like the hotels try to do. Imagine a residential ISP that offers castration at a lower price point than what is currently charged for monthly "raw" access. I think that many consumers would opt for that choice, while those who need access to everything would continue to pay the same rate. The price drop would be the incentive to get castrated, and what you give up would be access to things you likely don't use anyway. This castration process would be a big help to spam-blocking, evilware-blocking, ddos-blocking, etc. in addition to mitigating attacks against the mechanisms from hijacked residential computers. Marc
