@nickesc It's also disregarding that abstention is not a valid protest, but tacit approval of local majority norms. In left-majority districts, this is absolutely flaunting of privilege, and in right-majority districts essentially directly voting for the thing they claim to be abstaining against.

When a group is asked which direction the group should go, pouting because Macca's isn't an ordinal direction is stupid and childlike.

@briankrebs In case anyone is wondering "but why TTL, and why ONLY TTL?" I can answer that question, as I worked on one of the teams developing and implementing this very methodology.

The tethering detection is performed at the primary wireless gateway routers, usually a piece of big iron like Nokia 7750 SRs. The hardware is perfectly capable of using a variety of methods to detect tethering, but TTL stands head and shoulders above the rest for one very simple reason: it's cheap.

The Service Routers that ISPs and WISPs use are generally kept pretty close to a certain consumption ceiling. At the ISP I implemented this at, we tried our best to keep our HA clusters at 50% capacity, so if there was a failure or other failover causing event (more common than you'd think), there wouldn't be an impact to performance causing customer complaints.

Except for TTL monitoring, all methods of tethering detection either increased the load on the routing cards, breaking that capacity ceiling by huge amounts, or required licensing we didn't already have. Both of these constraints introduced considerable cost (from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to remediate network wide). And as the impact of tethering was known to be absolutely minuscule on our network (percentage of a percentage of a percentage of bandwidth consumption) and there was no actual identifiable cost impact from tethering in the first place, the cost could never be justified.

There were also operational challenges to implementing anything other than the simple config change necessary for implementing TTL monitoring (which I will not go into here) that prevented even pilot tests of any other method. Buy in from the engineering side was also sorely lacking, as no one in the division could be brought to even care about the situation, as it was just excitable reactions from C level to buzzwords that made them think of people on a boat with funny hats.

TL;DR: TTL is used because a) it's cheap and easy to implement, b) there's no actual business justification for any solution costing more, c) engineering couldn't be paid to care about it, and d) the "problem" it solves has no actual impact on the network.