The economic folly of this approach can be seen in the giant aluminum boxes being deployed on streetcorners by various media companies in the US. These are designed to cache movies and other media that the company would like to sell per view to people. The computing power and storage inside these boxes is outmatched by orders of magnitude by that owned by the potential customers by the time they reach the installation site and they are laughable five years later. People are better served sharing the things they care about by peer to peer file services like bittorrent had the companies in question built out fiber instead of boxes but ISPs would rather spend money on revenue generators for themselves.

For comparison see http://prof77.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/full-body-scanners-useless-air-security-expert-says/

The TSA’s body scanners are not so much about preventing terrorism but about benefiting Chertoff.

This kind of “service” is a huge waste of money that turns internet service providers from common carriers to censors. Better performance would be provided by building out better bandwith networks and the elimination of insecure software like Microsoft Windows.

I followed the directions to the opt out page but I’m annoyed by the whole thing, which looks like a little wall of China. The ISP monitors all traffic for error messages, then injects a javascript redirect. I run my own domain name server to avoid performance robbing domain resolution spam and because most ISP’s DNS is sub par, and targeted for injection attacks. Monitoring all traffic for error messages must take up a ton of resources and must be even worse for performance than previous spam methods. What’s worse is that the infrastructure can be used for censorship by substituting keywords and redirecting the desired traffic. Central control is being built into US cable networks that rob them of performance and can be more seriously abused. Only Open Spectrum can fix this problem.