[57136] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: State Super-DMCA Too True
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Rall)
Sun Mar 30 02:45:16 2003
In-Reply-To: <3E867F03.7040701@brightok.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Tony Rall <trall@almaden.ibm.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 23:42:42 -0800
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Saturday, 2003-03-29 at 23:22 CST, Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net>
wrote:
> William Allen Simpson wrote:
> > (Some DSL/cable companies try to charge per machine, and record the
> > machine address of the devices connected.)
>
> And to use NAT to circumvent this should be illegal. It is theft of
> service.
No, it is not theft of service. It doesn't cost an ISP more for me to
have 20 machines than it does if I have just 1. Nor does it cost them if
I use NAT.
What might cost them more is if I use more bandwidth or use additional IP
addresses (for which there may be an associated expense). But a user with
one machine can potentially use as much or more bandwidth than a user with
20. There simply isn't a decent correlation between number of machines
and amount of service consumed. Even so, an ISP doesn't have a legitimate
complaint against users that are simply consuming the bandwidth that the
ISP advertised as being part of their service.
Tony Rall
