Haha... do you think I'd be using Time Warner (my current ISP) if I had any other option short of moving?

Isn't that the truth. Can't wait for Google Fiber to come to my area...though I may have to wait a long while

It's the same up in Canada. The Canadian Government "broke up" Bell and forced them to allow other companies to provide content services. But now we are just stuck with multiple monopolies.

Don't like shaw OR cogeco OR rogers (depending on where you live)? Well, too bad!

I think 6 strikes will fail because although I (and I suspect most people) usually only get relatively obscure things (long tail..), I am still always paranoid about being slapped with a lawsuit.

With any "strikes" system I can download in peace, secure in the knowledge that nobody cares and that if anybody decides that they do care, that I get a warning before the lawsuits roll in.

>because if I were a user and I got one notification from my ISP, I would be shopping around for a new ISP.

If I was a user with choices, I'd do the same. I live in Tucson, and I have Comcast, which offers 12 mb/sec down on my plan, which is the medium one, or Qwest, which offers. . . 1.5 mb / sec down. Max. That's a joke. I'd have to move if Qwest were my only choice.

If only there was competition in even the largest cities. Large parts of NYC (largest city in the US) are offer only Time Warner. As in you cannot get anything else other than wifi/dialup.

I wish I had multiple, legitimate (aka not dial-up, not 4mbit adsl), choices for an ISP.

I wish I had more than two choices at 4 mbit. You can pick the phone company or the cable company. Neither is very good, and neither cares - they don't need to.

Heck, I wish I had one choice where I could call tech support, tell them that I've been getting dropped packets and 3000 ms pings for over a week, and not have them blow me off because the bandwidth tests fine.

I see this all the time.

"Run the speed test at blah.ourdomain.net and let me know the results"

"Okay, this is reporting great but when I try to..."

"Awesome is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Yes I'm still seeing packet loss and really high latency!"

"Must be on your side click"

So you shop for another ISP, and your choices are all part of the "six-strikes" plan. Then what? Internet abstinence?

Economic forces.

Once this happens to enough people a new provider will spring up catering to those banned from ISP's following the "six-strikes" plan.

Unlikely. The entire reason the US telecom market has so little competition currently is because of the cost of infrastructure. Touting that you won't follow the six strikes plan will give you a minor market of techies at best.

It's expensive to install infrastructure, but the costs aren't as high as these companies would have you believe, and further, they've been receiving money for years that was specifically intended to deliver fiber to the home.

There's already so much capacity sunk into the ground you wouldn't need to dig for another decade, you could just upgrade equipment on the end-points. Expensive but a lot less work than getting permits and ripping up roads.

If the rumors about Google are correct, they may be in for a rude awakening.

Your ISP and the company that owns the wires to your house need not be the same. And I doubt the company that provides your copper backhaul is going to be involved in any "six strikes" laws.

Incidentally, I hope the ISPs that own everything lose their common-carrier status when they start disconnecting people over copyright claims. Look at the rage that copyright enforcement has when audio is stripped from YouTube videos. I don't think people are going to be happy when their net connection is cut off.

> Your ISP and the company that owns the wires to your house need not be the same.

s/need not/are/

That's the default, but the telco will happily sell you a non-Internet wire that you can connect to the Internet yourself. (Or rather, pay some other company to do. Speakeasy used to work this way: they were the ISP and the telco owned the copper.)

I guess I should have qualified my statement: yes, technically it doesn't apply if you can live with dialup or DSL. Of course, if that's the case you don't use the Internet for very much anyway.

(I see from the website of Megapath, which is what Speakeasy seems to have morphed into, that they do actually provide broadband, but it looks like "small business" broadband--i.e., priced too high for a home user. Their offerings at home user prices are basically DSL.)

It's an interesting question... does this policy (assuming it is enforced to a reasonable degree) provide enough disturbance among customers to galvanize the telecom industry into reform?

I doubt it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see small scale upheaval given enough brouhaha.

Unless it is one selling point among many. What if Google starts rolling out fiber service to larger markets?

I would think if Google started getting big enough as an ISP, they would also implement the six strikes. Google has it's fingers in a lot of pies, among them selling media on Google Play. They'd have more to lose if the media conglomerates didn't give them access to their media than if they pissed off a few customers with the six strikes.

Google Play? You think Google makes enough on Google Play to break even? I see that as a "me too" business to keep pace with Apple and Amazon.

I would be shopping around for a new ISP right now if there was even a single alternative.