ReasonedResponse.com

What's scary, funny and boring at the same time?

Maybe it's the way in which Peter Svensson at the Associated Press uses bombastic rhetoric about mundane things like ISP Terms of Service Agreements.

You may remember Svensson as the AP writer who stirred a tempest in a teapot over Comcast slowing the connections of some users on its network who were abusing their connections with massive BitTorrent file swaps.  Never mind that what Comcast did was not (and still is not) a violation of any law.  Never mind that its efforts were intended to protect the rights and interests of the hundreds of other Internet users.  Svensson got 15 minutes of fame, the taxpayers were billed millions of dollars for the FCC to spin in circles, and in the final analysis most subscribers to the Internet arestill happier if their ISP is doing something to keep bandwidth hogs from sucking up all of their capacity on the Internet.

But now Svensson is at it again -- this time, noting that the Terms Of Service (TOS) agreements used by most ISPs fail to be the the bill of rights he imagines they should be. 

Sorry, Peter, but those TOS agreements exist more than anything else to protect the ISPs from a myriad of lawsuits, misunderstandings and abuses they would otherwise suffer at the hands of a tiny minority of litigation-minded users -- not to protect consumers from their ISPs.  Consumers are protected by thousands of pages of consumer laws and at least two full-time federal agencies, not to mention a couple of self-appointed "watchdog groups."

TOS Agreements are written in complicated legalese because in the real world they have to protect the ISPs in a court of law, not on the front pages of USA Today.  They are arcane in nature because in our litigation-minded society they have to be.  They are lengthy because you never know when some wacky consumer will cost you thousands or millions of dollars by finding a loophole in the TOS and launching a nuisance lawsuit in the hopes of getting rich quick.

If you read far enough down in Svensson's article -- past the part where all the progressive liberal pundits pontificate on how this demands government intervention and/or control of the Internet, he does actually point out that the real use of these agreements has been to stop spammers and other miscreants.  He actually notes how the TOS agreements have been used, and shows how they aren't nearly as vile in real life as his lead in to the story would lead the reader to believe.  (He might have also noted, but didn't, that the right of an ISP to remove objectionalbe content was specifically demanded in law by the Congress in 1996.) 

But let's face it, if the point of his article had been to show how effective these TOS agreements are in stopping the bad guys, he could have simply said that up front.   

And a memo to Mr. Svensson:  if you want to read some eye-watering legalese that leaves the average subscriber with little or no rights, take a gander at the legal agreements the Associated Press foists on you if you want to use their content on your web site or in your newsletter. 

For a far more human -- and interesting -- take on ISP Terms of Service Agreements, I really like Svensson's follow-on piece, which takes a lighter view of the TOS agreements and pokes a little fun at some of their more arcane provisions without stirring up unnecessary conflict.  I found it over on Yahoo.

As I've noted before, I spent more than a decade in Internet public policy fighting the RIAA and other content providers over file sharing, protecting the right of the technology to exist and opposing legislation that would have been detrimental to consumers.

But as we move forward, and more legitimate sources to buy music and video online make sharing it seem more like theft than sharing, I grow weary of all the debates over it.  If you are downloading to the point that you are violating a TOS agreement, you aren't just downloading security patches from Microsoft.  You aren't just downloading an occasional song or two, or even watching a lot of YouTube videos.

You are stealing.

And I'm content to let that be between you and the copyright holders, until it comes to you sucking up the bandwidth I pay for so you can have your bootleg music and videos.  When it comes to that, I hope my ISP invokes the TOS, hangs you by your thumbs, flogs you without mercy and lectures you sternly.  Then cuts off your access.