10:13am, Thursday 4 September 2003
Seen in demon.service
:
From: malcolm@demon.net (Malcolm Muir) Indeed there is much conversation around that suggests August saw the end of the free Internet and end user restrictions may be here to stay :(
("free" here means free from enforced HTTP proxies, SMTP smarthosts, ICMP blocks, etc)
This inspired the following comment:
From: Chris Lawrence <news@holosys.co.uk> I wonder if in the future this will develop into an architecture whereby ISPs have a presence on the Net and have to meet certain standards in order to do so, and end-users have a presence only within the ISPs and no direct access to the Net. It seems clear that we can't go on like this with viruses and spam and that something has to change. Perhaps AOL and Compuserve had the right models all along.
While I think the prospect of 'net connections only being available through providers like AOL and Compuserve is pretty unpleasant, something has got to happen to prevent the Internet continuing downhill and becoming useless.