[geeks] consumer internet service

[joshua d boyd]

This is with regards to yesterdays discussion of what reasonable internet
service is for $40 a month.

After thinking about it quite a bit, I've come to a few
conclusions.  These are things that a reasonable company should do, not
that I'm in favor of governmental action to compel it.

I think that a good ISP should initially permiss anything, but have a
system in place to watch for and deal with abuse.  For instance, an open
mail relay is obviously evil, but many of us would like better mail
services than our ISP want to deal with.  Sure, the ISP can just right us
off as the lunatic fringe who should just go spend our .com millions on
getting real internet access, but the real matter is that many families
have mail service that just don't suit them well, and they are un happy,
or they don't know better.  For instance, I think it is quite reasonable
for everyone in a family to have their own email address.  But, on top of
that, if the right software was in place (and it probably doesn't yet
exist in a form useable for normal people), having many email address
would be really handy.

Now, an ISP is never going to want to deal with the administration hassle
of dealing with 20+ email address per each account.  But, by allowing
users to run their own mail ports, when the software is in place to make
it reasonable, users can just have their own mail servers with as many
emails as they need.  This is something that could probably be easily
added as a feature to the increasing popular internet devices (I'm
thinking here of not the NIC, but the boxes that have an ethernet switch,
a wireless base, a PPPoE client, a NAT, a programmable firewall, etc all
in one box).  It's just that the ISP would need to have a system in place
to quickly detect and deal with open relay abuse (perhaps have a volume
trigger that spools up a certain amount for manual review).

But, this is just one slightly far fetched example.  Right now, many ISPs
object to running your own firewall, but if you do and you monitor the
logs, you see that your own firewall is a good thing.

Also, running your own web server could be increasingly usefull for normal
people.  Right now, radio.userland is a client program that is
increasingly popular with bloggers, and it has potential with other
users.  For instance, it should be easy to rejigger it as a documentation
tool.  Radio.userland runs it's own web server.  Right now, it is meant
for useage by the local user only, but someday someone will come up with a
reason why it would be handy for a group of people to be able to use the
web server.

Also, home monitoring solutions is another area where running a home web
server could be highly usefull.

Now, I under stand that most ISPs operate on paper thin margins.  And the
monitoring to prevent abuse could break those margins.  But then, the
appropriate responce should be to offer extra pricing options for extra
freedom.  For instance, I would be extremely happy to spend $5 a month for
verizon to offer a dyndns service where something like boyd.verizon.net
always points to my gateway (getter yet if I'm not connected it attempts
to send out a note to that affect).  I also would be extremely happy to
spend $5-$10 per month for a proper esmtp mail feed (all mail to
boyd.verizon.net would get help to be downloaded by esmtp, a service that
UUNet among other used to offer for ISDN and similar users, if I remeber
correctly).  And again, I would be extremely happy to spend say $2 per
month to be able to run my own FTP server (which even constrained to the
strickly legal would be tremendously usefull for me).  

But no.  I spend $40 for DSL, or I spend $200 for a dial up 56k that I can
do anything I want with, and there is nothing in between.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
http://www.cs.millersville.edu/~jdboyd/

IANAL: I am not a [lama|lawyer|luser|leper].