This is part of a post that I made on a discussion board a few minutes ago that I thought was relevant to the reasoner. As background, I had asked a question about whether Comcast, who technically does not allow servers but doesn’t enforce the rule in general, had suddenly taken steps to block certain server ports. I later figured out what was wrong myself, but in the meantime, I received the reply:

What part of not allowed to run a server do you not understand? Yes they will stop you from running a web server.

Here’s what I had to say to the first question, with some typos corrected (I actually made a lengthy post about what was wrong, and also about why they probably won’t actually stop me, or at least shouldn’t if they’re interested in making any money, but I won’t include any of that here.):

As for the first question, I don’t understand the “not allowed to run a webserver” part. The reason the internet is interesting, relative to TV, say, or even newspapers, magazines, and radio, is that it is fundamentally interactive. To produce and provide information is exactly as cheap/easy as to consume it. That is, it doesn’t take any more technology, time, or money to download a website than to upload one, on a hit by hit basis; to write a webpage, fancy techniques aside, is no different than writing text. Compare this to television/video, the next-most-recent information distribution system in wide use. For one, production is more expensive- prosumer grade video cameras run between $2500 and $5000, an order of magnitude above the cost of a television, and professional cameras are upwards of $100,000. And these figures don’t even take distribution into account- it is clearly much, much cheaper to buy a television than to build a television station. To disallow servers on high speed internet connections, especially considering how much dark cable this country has, is completely unreasonable. It makes the internet like television, which in turn reinforces the idea that information should come from specific “channels”, regardless of the biases, interests, and inherent limitations of such channels. But why should we define “important” or “interesting”, or even “true” in terms of what television chooses to transmit? The television model is fundamentally totalitarian, far more so even than its predecessors (basement printing presses and ham radio stations are much more common than private tv); the internet has the capacity to be perfectly democratic. Unless, of course, the companies that service it put external, unnatural limitations on it. So that’s the part of not allowing web servers that I don’t understand: it changes the internet in a truly unfortunate way.

Of course, what I didn’t mention is that Comcast is a television provider first and an internet provider second, so maybe they don’t agree with me about the relative values of each kind of distribution system…

Here’s the original discussion.

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