Mike Masnick ✅Kinda hoping that Netflix's new "we'll ban you if you watch the Netflix account you paid for outside of your home too much" story turns into a "New Coke"-style business school case study in how to do something totally stupid that pisses off your most loyal customers, and leads Netflix to reverse course quickly.
Lauren Weinstein@mmasnick Kinda reminds me of how in early public Internet days some big ISPs tried to charge separately for every device hooked to the Net, and even tried to ban NAT.
Kevin@lauren @mmasnick The phone company did this too. First you had to rent phones from them, then pay for each device connected. One of the ways they found "illegal" phones was the voltage drop from the number of phones that rang for an incoming call. So phone makers added a switch to turn off the ringer.
First phone mute button was for pirate phones.
@kevin @mmasnick By the time there were phones being sold publicly the major telcos had long since stopped counting subscriber phones. The traditional method for blocking the count of extra phones while still permitting them to ring was to put a neon bulb in series with the ringer. Or uh, so I've been told.