Hi,

On 29 Jan 2002 at 13:42, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Technically it does make a huge difference.  Most Internet wide area
...
> reserved bandwidth for their primarily outbound services.

Most such connections here are offered asymetric (ADSL) or cable TV 
connections that have something like 384KBit/s down- /64KBit upload. 
The problem is more, that providers do want to have good ads 
(unlimeted internet access) but do not want to provide it. In your 
example sending e-mail messages with hundreds of MB attachments was 
not acceptable either.

> Furthermore there's the support issue.  A bunch of end users who start
> running servers will inevitably put more drain on an ISP's support
> infrastructure, if only to deal with the inevitable increase in
> complaints from outside parties.

Most of these ISPs support staff is not available, neither for 
costomers nor for others.

> If a customer willingly signs up for such a client-only connection
> then how can it possibly be considered to be against "good habits"?

This comes from a consumer protection structure, like the maximum 
appartment rent for appartments of a given category. The specific 
problem here is the lack of an accurate definiton of the term 
"internet connection". If they sold it as "client access to the 
internet" you were right. It is like renting an appartment, if you 
wish to prevent the people to eg. cook there you must offer it as 
"sleeping facility" because an "appartment" is a place where you 
live, sleep, cook, wash your clothes and so on. If you sell an 
"internet connection" it will be pretty hard to force the customers 
to use your DNS-, mail-, whateverservers, proxy etc. or limit it in 
another way but bandwidth or amount of traffic.

> No doubt in many jurisdictions in the world if an ISP is naive enough
> to offer fixed-IP connections to customers and then only after the
> fact decide to limit those connections to client-only service then
> they risk being legally complled to either restore service or
> compensate their former customers for loss of service.

At least here, the laws offer to change the contracts and make this 
changes take effect within a reasonable period (usually a couple of 
months). But the situation for our spamming problem here is 
different: these people are allowed to have servers, but the provider 
wants to control the operation of these servers. We had situations, 
where providers disconnected "broadband" customers who ran 
CodeRed/Nimda infected MS Systems. This is to be considered illegal. 
There is no legal way to force people to keep their systems secure as 
they are considered to be "victims" themselves. It is hardly possible 
to offer "internet access" only to Unix or Mac or windows users or 
refuse the service to the users of one of these products. The 
provider of an open relay does not do any harm himself, but rather is 
"exploited" by others. Personally I would want to get involved in any 
legal action here.

Tom