Will people pay for supposed "privacy"? Sure, a few would but absolutely not everyone. Or even a majority of people.

The fact that the local police or FBI can subpoena records held by your ISP to find out what you have been doing online and that Google will disclose that you have been researching poisons if your spouse suddenly dies of some rare and obscure poison is irrelevent to most people. Most people more or less figure that if you have been researching poisons and your spouse dies from one that you probably did it and deserve what is coming.

The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them.

If you are downloading movies, music, software, ebooks and whatever else you can grab off BitTorrent today and after a huge legal effort you get caught, well, most people's attitude is (a) I wish I knew how to do that... and (b) sucks to be you. Again, the offender is 99% of the time the person getting nailed and while there is a possiblity of the wrong person getting stuck with the bill we have seen through history that it is rare enough that most people discount it ever possibly happening to them. So it isn't important.

So this can be planned and might attract a few geeky investors. But it is extremely unlikely to survive even one year and probably won't ever be launched. The reality is that almost nobody cares will sink in and doom the project.

Nice idea. Too bad nobody cares. I do not see it affecting mainstream cable companies in the slightest little bit.

Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.

Another possibility, however, is if he gets anywhere close to a working model where this is possible that he suddenly has an "accident," or his data-center suffers a "mysterious fire." Or maybe the CIA kills his network engineers the way Israel kills mechanical engineers they think can build high-speed centrifuges in Iran.

Probably more like an invitation for an FBI raid.

Stop being so USA centric- there is a whole world to put your server- and not just in a dictatorship like america.

It will not work unfortunately for these reasons:

1. he is an american, everywhere you go now the US can get you
2. it is located in America
3. The us government owns the root name servers, hence the internet.

Far closer to the idea that he has 100 customers but needs 10,000 to fund the operations. Can something like this ever get enough customers to operate? Not if they charge a penny more than a non-privacy protecting ISP - it simply isn't a priority for most people. A few, yes, and that is all the customers something like this would ever have.

Far too few to make a go of it. No reason for anyone to attack it - it will die of lack of interest.

If he pulls this off, expect tougher laws on data collection requirements for ISPs.

I'm trying to figure this post out - did you put it up ironically, like, "Hey, look how completely uninformed this Russian guy is about the U.S., isn't this funny?" Or were you actually serious? The cluelessness meter is off the charts, but I can't tell if it is a joke or not...

> Frequently in the last several decades children have had to rely on parents taking schools to court to avail themselves of the right to pray

Typical Alex Jones bullshit. Go to a private school if you want my tax dollars paying for your superstition. And don't make me fund any fucking vouchers for it either.

It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.

As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.

I dont think he fails to account for other news medias.
I think he means that the big corporations disparage and disregard the other outlets publicly, calling them bloggers and such, to the point that they slandered out of legitimacy.

-HasHie

If the ISP uses NAT instead of real IP addresses for each customer, that would cover the vast majority of issues that currently impact customers. If IP addresses are shared, they can't trace back an IP address to a single account holder.

Short of that, you could set up a localized TOR network that only consists of local users on the same broadband connection, so that it has nearly the speed of a native connection while providing a good deal of privacy. If you had a broadband provider that included that by default in a provided router, that would be great.