Fairpoint Pledges To Violate Net Neutrality

[thegoodnessisgood]

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| from the we'll-read-it-to-you-over-the-phone dept. |
| posted by timothy on Saturday December 27, @14:46 (The Internet) |
| http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/27/1833202 |
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wytcld writes "[0]Fairpoint Communications, which [1]has taken over
Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has
announced that on February 6 'AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will
continue to have access to content but will [2]no longer be able to
access their e-mail through the third-party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and
other third-party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net
portal. Since Verizon spun off its lines to Fairpoint in a maneuver that
[3]got debt off of Verizon's balance sheets by saddling Fairpoint with
it, there was [4]concern by the public service boards of the three states
about how Fairpoint would deal with that debt. Fairpoint's profit plan:
force all Webmail users through Fairpoint's portal, by blocking all
direct access to Webmail portals other than its own. Will Fairpoint's own
search engine portal be next? What can stop them?"

[thomps1d]

Both as a nerd and a system administrator at a mid-sized ISP, this sort of thing really grinds my gears. I've got no objection to the first part of their plan - that is, providing a centralized portal through which users can access third party content (this sort of simplified access is a big help to the technophobic), but the second part of their plan is abhorrent.

The only purpose of an ISP is to provide access to internet services. Make sure data gets from point A to point B.

The good part of this is that it will convince customers to become more aware of how technology works so that they can bypass whatever hairbrained censorship attempts are put in place. It's not that hard to encrypt data, use a proxy server, or both - which completely eliminates the usefulness of any attempt to block the information in the first place. All the company does is waste their time and money, and maybe confuse some of their less tech-savvy customers.