From: asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org On Behalf Of Seth Breidbart
This is to me a short sighted perspective. Not only are there
significant logistical costs to switching ISPs (economists would say
there is significant friction in the transaction) in many many areas
it
is the case that just one ISP has a monopoly, and there simply isn't
another choice.
If you have Internet access, there's another choice. I've been using
Panix since 1993 or so, but I haven't been dialing directly into it
for most of that time. I get raw IP service locally (that has to be
local, and may have limited options); email and netnews come from
where _I_ want.
Asking me to choose between a 24.4 kbps dialup (my phone lines are poor
quality) and a 750 Mbps broadband is only offering a false choice. My
ISP owns me, body and soul. And I'm by no means alone in that situation;
there are millions of others.
Indeed, that is the situation for me personally: I'm stuck with my
cable provider, whether I like them or not, and that's unlikely to
change for decades (my property boundary is a telco central office
boundary, so DSL will never come).
How do they prevent you from having an email account elsewhere?
They prevent it because they own the filtering behavior on outbound
email (port 25 or whatever). They can and do deny or allow me to engage
with other mail addresses entirely at their whim. Concretely, I've been
cut off entirely twice in the last two-ish years.
Bob
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