Filtered Internet Service Provider

[Albert Lunde]

>Seriously, how many, if any dollars is this going to take out of parent's
>pockets?  ISPs currently offer filtered Internet at no or very low
>additional cost.  The amount, if any that this will add to monthly bills
>would almost certainly be insignificant.

I'd like to see some cost/price estimates to justify than conclusion; I'm
not convinced the costs are insignificant for a smaller ISP to set up and
administer. The way the costs scale causes problems.

What you are talking about, at a minimum, is a filtering proxy or router
with a list of "bad" and/or "good" sites (for some definition of
"bad"/"good"), perhaps, in the case of the proxy, extended down to the
granularity of directories in URL space. Someone has to pay the costs of
this extra hardware and the costs of creating the blacklist/whitelist.

There are signficant hardware economics of scale, as you get more people to
share your filtering proxy server. If you only pay once for the
balacklist/whitelist, there are economies of scale there too.

(If I was offering Internet blacklists as a service for sites too small to
compile their own, I'd try to bill them on estimated user population, but
not at a linear rate.)

So this could make it a lot cheaper per user for, say AOL, to offer
filtered Internet access, than a "mom and pop" ISP startup.

All of which argues, in favor of wide-area ISPs (i.e like AOL or the WELL)
offering filtered access as an extra-value service, and against requiring
every ISP to provide it.


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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu