Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sun Mar 1 01:24:09 UTC 2015

On 02/28/2015 02:49 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
> On 2/28/2015 4:38 PM, Barry Shein wrote:
>> Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from
>> deploying "commercial" services. As were bandwidth caps.
>>
> Hmm, at one point I was going to ask if anyone else remembered a long
> time ago ISPs having something in their TOS about not hosting servers.
> It's been so long, I thought that perhaps I might be remembering wrong.

You remember correctly.  How cable companies "enforced" this particular
ToS clause would very, but one tactic was to have short DHCP leases, and
guaranteee that the IP address would change at lease "renewal".  To
counter, we got third-party Dynamic DNS service which would allow a
cable customer to periodically update the IP address of a domain, with a
short TTL so that a change would take effect immediately.

The other side of this:  cable DNS servers would, on its own dime, cache
DNS lookups with week-long TTLs to thwart Dynamic DNS.  It was quite a
war there for a while.

(N.B.: "we forced long TTLs to reduce the traffic necessary across our
peering points."  At one point, the cable people said they had one,
count 'em one, peering link at 44 megabits/s, to serve all cable
companies [with their own internal network].  I still don't know whether
to buy that or not, and now it's moot.)

How did I know about the DNS server manipulation?  I worked for a Web
hosting company with about 3,000 domains being served.  Whenever the
company renumbered (until it finally got its own IP allocation in order
to multi-home) we would have to service the old addresses and new
addresses for a week.  When the cable DNS servers finally aged out the
old addresses, we could shut down the old ones.  Royal admin pain in the
neck.

Dunno if this is still true anymore.