nanog mailing list archives

Re: Do ISP's collect and analyze traffic of users?


From: Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>
Date: Wed, 17 May 2023 06:06:40 +0200



On 5/16/23 16:55, Saku Ytti wrote:

I can't tell what large is. But I've worked for enterprise ISP and
consumer ISPs, and none of the shops I worked for had capability to
monetise information they had. And the information they had was
increasingly low resolution. Infraprovider are notoriously bad even
monetising their infra.

I'm sure do monetise. But generally service providers are not
interesting or have active shareholders, so very little pressure to
make more money, hence firesales happen all the time due
infrastructure increasingly seen as a liability, not an asset. They
are generally boring companies and internally no one has incentive to
monetise data, as it wouldn't improve their personal compensation. And
regulations like GDPR create problems people rather not solve, unless
pressured.

I tend to agree.

ISP's are, generally, terrible at evolving beyond selling bandwidth.

While there might be some ISP's that are able to monetize the data they collect - to whatever degree that monetization is useful - I'd hazard that the majority don't do this because it requires a different mindset that most ISP's simply don't have.

Mark.


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