America's Broad Band Crisis Worsens with the Prospect of Spying ISPs
As America's monopolized ISPs continue to gouge prices, and pass unilateral pratices that treat their customers unfairly, and continue to wage war on net neutrality. CNN reports a new prospect possible on the horizon. Your ISP might have an incentive to spy on you.In regards to the new 'voluntary' graduated response deal; where no one really knows how ISPs will track and accuse customers of copyright infringement, according to CNN, it may be the ISP directly spying on their customers.
From the article:
The fact that they are all agreeing to participate makes it harder for any one company to win the disgruntled customers of those who have been disciplined by another.
But now that they're free from individual blame, there's also the strong possibility that the ISPs will be doing the data monitoring directly. That's a much bigger deal. So instead of reaching out to the Internet to track down illegally flowing bits of their movies, the studios will sit back while ISP's "sniff" the packets of data coming to and from their customers' computers. While they're simply claiming to be protecting copyright holders, ISPs have a lot to gain from all this as well.
The article then goes on to suggest that the whole anti-piracy scheme may be just a ruse, once allowed to spy; there is a lot of valuable information that an ISP can obtain. For example: selling a competitors information. An Internet security expert Josh Klein, has moved his servers outside the United States, and suggest any other wise company would do the same.
The risk of losing their 'net [access] because someone accidentally streamed the wrong thing is a business prerogative significant enough to tunnel all their traffic to a country that provides sensible data privacy laws.
As America's broadband crisis worsens, the solution to the problem becomes more and more far fetched. If the US wants to be an internet savvy country, they still need the competition in the market place that's always been missing; companies that spy, throttle, and censor internet traffic need to be held accountable by potential customers that choose not to use them. The post office should be upgraded to deliver our modern digital communications. An internet bill of rights that is not a sneaky anti-piracy measure needs to be enacted which should include net neutrality, customer privacy, and the freedom of speech. Perhaps the problem is that the US doesn't want to be an internet savvy country because we just love those shinny dvd discs from the 1990s and "does darn puter things jist suk up are electric bill and dnt help anyshing on the farm".
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