Do ISP's collect and analyze traffic of users?

Wed May 17 04:06:40 UTC 2023

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.