Thou shalt not question Comcast

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:36:30AM -0500, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
>>> It is clear that comcast/(all ISP's) cannot afford to sell
>>> residential services if customers can effectively "resell"
>>> (or give away) those same "services" to others.
>> I don't buy this either.  They can always undersell you, since they are the
>> upstream provider.  
> 
> Matt, they can't undersell "free"  and its difficult to undersell 
> "priced at one tenth the cost of the service" (deep pockets and
> time can win there though) but the price isn't actually relevant. 
> 
> Its not a market competition.

I think we were talking about different things.  I was talking about actually
reselling access, I see now you were talking about giving away the "web
service".  That's quite a stretch in my opinion, since the stuff I am (or was)
"serving" on my home web server isn't competing with something that Comcast is
offering, and it ultimately has no real effect on bandwidth usage (see below).

> So one perspective on the word "servers" as used by ISP's means:
> "Letting everyone else in the world use your machine (for Mail or 
> to read web pages from)".

Here's the thing: Comcast offers Web hosting and email to it's customers.
Let's assume that I use Comcast's "services" for all my family-photo-album and
email, instead of my own server.  There is the exact same upstream bandwidth
usage from Comcast's point of view (assuming the service Comcast offers is
roughly equivalent to what I'd set up on my own box, which is admittedly a
stretch; their services are grossly inferior).  The only difference is in the
"last mile" to my house.

But I think we both agree that the bandwidth isn't (any longer) a logical
reason for a no-server rule, so I'll stop here.

Matt