More DPI (or what Marketplace? djf)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Dan Gillmor [dan () gillmor com]
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 5:00 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: More DPI

> In any commercial transaction (buying a car, haircut, or ISP
> services),
> parties are limited by the law, regulation, and the contract/terms of
> service.  Anything else is fair game; people can do what they want.
> Disclosure will occur if there are regulations/ToS requiring it;
> otherwise,
> it will be as the market dictates.

The first two of those offer many different competitors. The last
offers, at most, two competitors in the vast majority of places. They
come from regulated, monopoly industries where they could not have
pulled this kind of crap before; imagine, as someone else has noted,
if phone companies declared it their right to listen in on
conversations in order to sell products (or anything else). Now,
abusing the power they've been handed by a clueless Congress (which
will, I predict, do *nothing* but be concerned when it comes down to
actual legislation) and a pro-corporate executive branch, they are
acting almost in concert to assert anti-privacy rights with their
customers, who have essentially no alternatives.

This is not a fair game. It's a rigged one, with a "marketplace" that
is so uneven in power that the customer is helpless.



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