i remember filing this under "dubious but probably legal b/c of some ridiculous ToS bullshit" when i first saw comcast's announcement about this a while back. t

i remember filing this under "dubious but probably legal b/c of some ridiculous ToS bullshit" when i first saw comcast's announcement about this a while back. the electricity angle seems pretty interesting-- no matter what arguments comcast could plausibly make about it not affecting your personal bandwidth it's pretty much impossible for them to argue that they're not essentially "stealing" electricity to subsidize their wifi network. ianal, but the two keys here appear to be that the customers affected seem only to be people leasing equipment from comcast (ie the customers don't own the routers) and the opt-out nature of how the network is currently set up, as compared to a (kinder) parallel universe where such a network would be opt-in. as to the latter point, i'm not sure if there is any difference in terms of legal doctrine but it definitely speaks to comcast's greed / customer hostility that they felt entitled to make the customer subsidize them, instead of, say, giving the customer a discount on their bill if they chose to opt in to providing a base station for the network.