On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 12:25:59PM -0400, William H. Geiger III wrote: [...]
Now if an access provider does detailed analysis of his traffic and determins that he needs only 4 T3's to provide service for 20 T1's and therefore reduces his costs that's fine. But if one of his T1 customers traffic increases he is obligated to add more bandwith on his end to handle it.
He has several other options. Most importantly, he can terminate the agreement. This gives the customer a choice -- find another provider, or moderate their use. As I said, this stuff sometimes isn't written in the contract, but it's there, nonetheless.
This is what the whole bandwith issue comes down to.
Thinking about this a little more, however, this whole line of reasoning has almost nothing to do with the bandwidth problem associated with spam, and is a complete red herring. Granted that you have contractually guaranteed that you get full time 24/7 28.8 modem access, and you have paid for it. I can still completely flood your bandwidth with stuff you don't want. Granted that at your machine you can throw away the stuff as fast as your receive it. But you aren't receiving the stuff you want to receive, because I have completely choked your line. Spam can be thought of, therefore, as essentially a low-level denial of service attack. What is overlooked in the free speech debate is that speech always has a physical manifestation, and that physical manifestation may in itself cause harm, regardless of the semantic content of the speech. For example, I could rupture your eardrums by putting a megaphone next to your head. And I can cause you economic harm by flooding your mailbox with stuff you don't want. I have a right to speak; you have a right to not pay attention. I don't have the right to force you to pay attention. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html