Democracy player 0.9

Democracy player 0.9

I think the ISPs are well aware of how the Internet was designed to work, and they work overtime to work around that architecture. They know that it generally costs more to connect up a server than to connect up typical home web-browsing computer. And they know that people who don't plan to run servers aren't willing to pay the price for a big enough pipe to do so.

Therefore, they try hard to segment the market and supply small pipes to home web-browsing computers at low prices. That's not easy because as you point out, the Internet isn't set up for that. You have to do ugly things like 1) require unenforceable promises from your customers not to run "servers" and 2) throttle packets containing certain port numbers. But it beats the alternative of distributing the cost of high volume servers to small-volume users, and thus drive all small volume users to your competitors.

There's a simple alternative I really wish ISPs would use: charge the user for his own traffic. Then the user can decide for himself whether it's worthwhile to upload or download a movie, rather than the ISP peeking at the content and making a value judgement as to how important it is.

I don't think demanding publishing rights from one's ISP is a big deal. I think most are more than willing to sell them to you (it's called business class IP service). Demanding that they bill your non-publishing neighbors for it is harder.