On Wednesday, December 15, 2010 05:47:09 pm Adam Rothschild wrote: > What we have here is Comcast holding its users captive, plain and > simple. They have established an ecosystem where, to reach them, one > must pay to play, otherwise there's a good chance that packets are > discarded. [snip] > Folk in > content/hosting should find this all more than a little bit scary.
I'm surprised no one here has thought of the obvious thing content providers can do to communicate to the customers of the providers who artificially throttle traffic from 'freeloading' content providers. In the web server configuration, detect what network is accessing the page. If it's a provider who is trying to coerce content provider payment, tell the eyeball up front that that's the case, and give a pointer to the place on the FCC website (or the FCC phone number) where they can lodge a complaint. If it gets ugly, simply don't serve content to those eyeballs. In other words, a content provider boycott of eyeball networks that want to try to play hardball. If you get enough content providers to band together to do this, the customers of those eyeball networks will make a difference. Hrmph, all you really have to do is get google or facebook to boycott an eyeball network. IOW, if there's no content to see, there's no need for an 'Internet' connection.
