It's a common fallacy that all port blocking and IP blacklisting by ISPs is necessarily evil.
Two recent examples have shown up on Boing Boing. Now I love Boing Boing, and read it avidly. Sometimes, however, things stray a bit too far from being a Directory of Wonderful Things, and brilliant English literacy gets mistaken for economic literacy.
Both articles touched on ISP filtering. The first from Ecuador, translated into English here says:
"Satnet, one of the largest providers of Internet access in Ecuador ... has decided to censor net content, blocking access to any file-exchange services (P2P sites) ... In an act that goes against their own usage-policy, the provider has given different excuses for different users, spreading light on their poor customer service and useless policy regulations.
Satnet users, calling to ask for explanations, have heard different versions: [etc.]
This is painted as a censorship issue, but just as easily it could be seen as a bungled price discrimination effort. It's a simple consumer misrepresentation issue; you've been sold a service that's supposed to transport all packets to all ports, and got something less. They're trying to segment out heavy P2P users, who are getting more benefit and should be paying more.
On the other hand, consider this one complaining of a Canadian ISP banning home servers:
... It was reported in Vancouver that Canadian telecom giant Telus has outlawed home servers for its customers with residential highspeed service. Ports used by such ftp, telnet and IRC servers, among others, have been blocked. According to Telus, 'These security measures are designed to reduce illicit traffic.'
The excuse is clearly bogus, but you just have to recognise that this is again price discrimination.
Are these evil? That depends. If you've no choice of ISP and no choice of paying more to avoid restrictions, then your ability to partake in society is clearly dented if your information pipe is leaking bits into the soil. That's a public policy problem. If you can pay more, but have no choice of supplier, then there's probably a competition problem. But expecting suppliers not to price discriminate is a bit like hoping water will start flowing uphill. Finally, if there's plenty of supplier competition, and still price discrimination, then hurrah! The market is being extended downwards to people who otherwise could not afford to participate.
So without context, these articles that present price discriminating activity as a priori a bad thing are just meaningless.
Unless, of course, you believe broadband is a posiive human right and everyone should have unfettered access for free paid for by the goblins and fairies.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:06 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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