It's extremely bad. The fact that ISP monopolies are not regulated in favor of consumers is slowly going to destroy the openness that has made the web so successful. Instead of giving us raw pipes these monopolies are injecting themselves as proxies where they can monitor, cap bandwidths, shape traffic, censor content, insert messages and even add ads, which Comcast already does when a DNS request is not resolved in a HTTP session.
If you look at what Comcast does on the TV side, things like adding ads to the guide so it's barely usable, you can see where this is going. But the federal regulators of the monopolies are asleep at the switch, we can't even get network neutrality passed. The monopolies know how to play the lobbying game as well as how to slowly turn up the heat so the users aren't all outraged at once. But we can expect more abuses, more ads, more monitoring, more restrictions, more unwanted 'value adds' as time goes on.
| It's extremely bad. The fact that ISP monopolies
| are not regulated in favor of consumers is slowly
| going to destroy the openness that has made the
| web so successful.
This is a little over the top. Whether or not to use this to notify users of time-sensitive information could be a question posed at even a small ISP without such 'evil ambitions.'
It's probably more useful to discuss the pros/cons of this approach to notifying users than it is to decry over-arching problems with the entire industry. These (over-arching industry issuse) have been discussed ad nauseum, and action is more useful than discussion at this point (at least on technical forums such as this).
| But the federal regulators of the monopolies
| are asleep at the switch
If you look at what Comcast does on the TV side, things like adding ads to the guide so it's barely usable, you can see where this is going. But the federal regulators of the monopolies are asleep at the switch, we can't even get network neutrality passed. The monopolies know how to play the lobbying game as well as how to slowly turn up the heat so the users aren't all outraged at once. But we can expect more abuses, more ads, more monitoring, more restrictions, more unwanted 'value adds' as time goes on.