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“It’s because the law gave them too much leeway” doesn’t make sense. If you have leeway, you choose the easiest and cheapest method, not the one that involves b
by twhb 8y ago
“It’s because the law gave them too much leeway” doesn’t make sense. If you have leeway, you choose the easiest and cheapest method, not the one that involves building a whole new communication system.
“They thought it was the only way to satisfy the law” also doesn’t make sense. There’s no reasonable way to get that from the law, they didn’t confirm it was necessary, and they didn’t publicly fuss about being forced into a large expenditure.
Today is, by the way, the one year anniversary of the repeal of net neutrality. ISPs, including CenturyLink, were viciously fighting to end rules preventing the sale of selective internet access, and won. In order to sell selective internet access, you need exactly the system that just showed up. This system would take a while to build—maybe a year. And once it’s built, you would want to test it. The test would put your capitalization on the lack of net neutrality in the spotlight—unless you just serve a legal notice, and pretend you thought you had to. For that to work, you need to make sure people know the “legally required” part; for a legitimately legally-required notice, companies typically don’t say as much. CenturyLink literally highlights it.
- nacs 8y ago1) Most ISPs have something like this router/software -- one that is capable of injecting/redirecting web requests to whatever they want. I remember seeing this kind of thing when I was a Comcast customer -- they implemented a bandwidth limit and to warn you that you were about to exceed it, they used this type of web request injection. 2) There's likely a profit motive here as the software that is being advertised via this injected message costs money. They're likely getting a commission/affiliate fee from every customer that installs said software via this notice.
- B-Con 8y ago> “It’s because the law gave them too much leeway” doesn’t make sense. If you have leeway, you choose the easiest and cheapest method, not the one that involves building a whole new communication system. No, you choose the most self-interested option. That type of criticism is usually levied against laws that provide an incentive to enforce it in a self-serving way. In this case what CenturyLink did should itself be illegal. CenturyLink knows fully well this was a self-serving move and they likely only did it because they're betting they can avoid lawsuits by blaming the law. Interfering with traffic on a paying customer's active account should be illegal so there is no option to do this for any reason.
- nickodell 8y ago>involves building a whole new communication system. Did this require building a new communication system? Comcast has a similar injection system for reminding you to pay your bill, or to notify you that you've been accused of piracy. Maybe this was done using hardware and software they had lying around.