[Aardwolf]

An idea I've posted as a tangent in various places on the Internet, but which never got a response there.

American ISPs suck. Why not start our own ISP? With blackjack, and hookers.



Benefits:

• Focus on service rather than profit
• More transparent
• More accountable
• Anti-trust law should keep existing ISPs from making traffic in/out suffer

Problems/Uncertainties:

• Required initial investment?
• Existing ISPs would find a way to make life hell

Discuss.

[Nuke]

put the hookers back in and il think about it.

[Polpolion]

I would be all over this if I had loads of disposable money and didn't already have a job and hobbies that takes up most of my time. I hate our ISPs.

[Aardwolf]

Thing is I don't really know what all would be involved, just from a hardware viewpoint. If I wanted to connect to an existing network, how does that work? Would the existing ISPs be able to refuse to let me hook up my cables to theirs? That's anti-competitive and probably illegal, but I wouldn't count on the ISPs playing fair

[Polpolion]

That's why you need loads of disposable income so you can hire someone who's qualified to do this. You can't even go looking for investors because not-for-profits don't usually give them good returns. Your best bet is to find a bunch of like-minded people locally to group together and buy access from a transit provider and maintain appropriate resources for distributing that service. Getting your city to provide internet as a municipal service would be a good idea if ISPs weren't working so hard to prevent that.

[Aardwolf]

Qualified to do what?

I guess I shouldn't have said from a hardware viewpoint, I meant from a control-of-the-hardware viewpoint.

[FIZ]

Germans already did it.

[Aardwolf]

Interesting; I had not heard of this. However, I suspect conditions in Germany are considerably different? The ISPs here are pretty well entrenched.