Thou shalt not question Comcast

[jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:23:46PM -0500, David Kramer wrote:
> I'm having trouble understanding your point of view.  You decided to go
> with a cheap service that explicitly forbids you to run servers, then
> you run servers, and are mad at them when they block the servers?
> They're enforcing the agreement you signed up for.  Why are you mad?


The major problem here is that "servers" is an ill-defined, and vague
term. ISP's chose the term arbitrarily to simplify managing their
networks

It is clear that comcast/(all ISP's) cannot afford to sell
residential services if customers can effectively "resell"
(or give away) those same "services" to others.  So one
perspective on the word "servers" as used by ISP's means:

"Letting everyone else in the world use your machine (for Mail or 
to read web pages from)". Because their bandwidth allocation
scheme collapses if you do and their revenue model collapses
along with it. (OK, I'm stating the obvious, bare with me )

ISP's can't(won't) invest the money needed to tell the difference
between reasonable household use of an SMTP capable program and someone
selling SMTP portal/proxy access, (four users versus 4000 .. ), they
simplify their lives by outlawing all SMTP traffic from all residential
nodes. (or as much SMTP traffic as they can.. ;-)

Same thing goes for HTTP traffic. 

A reasonable family household's web server picture archive will
use less bandwidth per month than most people consume just
watching you tube online, in most cases, by orders of magnitude.

The "no servers" rule was probably put in place in the early days
when some techy folks (like us :-)) got accounts and started
immediately using up, what was back then, gobs of bandwidth. The
ISP's saw that lots of user's doing that would kill their
business

SMTP traffic is especially onerous to ComCast because residential
nodes on Comcast's network was one of the leading causes of SPAM
in the world (maybe still is )

Running sendmail on a household machine that services your four
family members puts no more load on the network than having those
people run pop/imap email clients.  In fact, since those clients
need to poll for mail, sendmail actually uses LESS bandwidth. 

Since sendmail is part of a mail system that BOTH initiates
requests and responds to requests, it is not a server, but 
a peer to peer system. This is one perspective which does not
agree with the ISP's view of Sendmail. One technical definition
of a server is a system/program that only responds to requests
and does not initiate them.

So my final thought is that ISP's are just using an arbitrary 
label of server to give themselves a simple tool for controlling
excess bandwidth use and stopping undesired traffic/uses of their
network.

The fact that this impacts many of us who want to use the
Internet more efficiently and responsively is of no concern to
them. We are simply collateral damage in their big picture.  
Sadly, I can their point. (but I use SMTP anyway.)