Some of you might be wondering why "a little over a dozen" people being booted from their ISP is newsworthy. This is figuratively the beginning of a very, very slippery slope.
The problem is ISPs and content providers, or both, are prioritizing their needs over other industries.
Say someone does pirate something, and the cost of that is a few hundred or even thousands of dollars that they wouldn't have bought anyways in most cases or couldn't afford. Well they also use the internet to purchase products, pay bills, and the internet is part of daily life now. Cutting someone off from the network utility because of even large amounts of digital goods being pirated is the wrong approach as it has collateral damage to other products/industries, survival of the person and possibly their family and more.
Should the person pay a fine? Yes. Should they lose their internet? No, unless ISPs and content providers, or if they are one in the same, are more important than every other industry. ISPs/content providers aren't more important than every other industry and ISPs are more of a utility that needs to be always available, other methods are needed, cutting someone off from a needed service to live is cruel and unusual punishment.
> Last week, HBO went dark for the first time ever after a carriage dispute with Dish. Critics of the merger, include the DOJ, alleged that AT&T may have intentionally failed to come to an agreement with Dish, in an effort to steal Dish's Pay-TV subscribers.
I'm used to what's called local loop unbundling in the UK and Europe - which is the removal of the last mile monopoly, and all ISPs simply putting a DSLAM in exchanges. Initially this was localised, and there were smaller local players, but they're now effectively all nationwide.
Some have more. Some have less. I've never lived somewhere that had only one choice though, so I'm not sure how common it is.
DSL (with a single provider) is my only option for wired internet at home. Satellite and cellular are both available, but with higher prices and sever data caps.
I have an office 1.5 miles away that also has a cable line that can do ~120Mbps down and ~5 up, but the cable lines end about a mile from my house.
It did exist in some form after the 1996 Telecommunications Act so it happened somewhat with DSL providers, but the laws were narrow, didn't address other issues that arise as a result of the law, and didn't include cable/fiber/etc
So any speed differences between ISPs are mostly down to the quality or not of the ISP's network. Which means roughly Talktalk bad, A&A good, but the sync speed should be the same. :)
You have ISP #1, who have relatively modern infrastructure and bandwidth.
You may or may not have ISP #2, who have antiquated infrastructure they don't maintain that delivers bandwidth circa 2005.
You probably also have ISP #3, who use alternate delivery technologies (wimax, satellite, etc) to deliver low bandwidth at exorbitant prices.
So if Comcast decides not to sell me service, I'm screwed. They could charge as much as they want and to a point I'd just have to suck it up and pay. I assume the reason it isn't multiple times more expensive is because there is some regulation from the PUC capping what they can charge.
Smart pirates use vpns anyways.
You really were pirating so such positive proof doesn't really exist and you're off the internet for good.
So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.
And since, for me at least, if I got my internet shut off I would pretty much have to move that's plenty of coercive power.