[e2e] Re: crippled Internet

[RJ Atkinson]

At 00:25 18/04/01, Vernon Schryver wrote:

>What about the following words from 
>http://www.home.com/support/aup/ ?
>
>    You may not run a server in connection with the @Home
>    residential service, nor may you provide network services to
>    others via the @Home residential service. The @Home
>    residential service includes personal Webspace accounts for
>    publishing personal Web pages. Examples of prohibited uses
>    include, but are not limited to, running servers for mail, http,
>    ftp, irc, and dhcp, and multi-user interactive forums. 
>
>I've seen reports that say that @Home employees interpret those words as prohibiting any program that does a passive TCP open, 
>but that they also say that the AUP is not heavily enforced.

        The AUP gives them legal aircover to shut down bandwidth
hogs that are bandwidth hogs due to improper servers.  The most 
common case I know of was folks with GNUtella or illegal (due 
to copyright law) ftp/http servers with MP3s.  @Home only checks 
for bandwidth hogs when there are performance complaints about 
a specific residential subnet.  When there is a bandwidth hog
identified due to that circumstance, there is nearly always
(in my experience, it was ALWAYS an MP3 server) an inappropriate
server.  For folks like most of us, @Home doesn't check or care
about a small ftp or http server, provided it doesn't cause
other customers to have visible performance degradation.

        I might wish the US legal system were other than it is,
but it is what it is.  The legal system drives the AUP text,
not the actual practices of the operator.

Ran
rja at inet.org