Therefore, someone using email or news postings for abusive purposes can have a large financial impact on the networks involved. Aside from the financial costs, someone who has fallen victim to some sort of Internet abuse has other costs in terms of decreased effectiveness of the Internet. A newsgroup subscriber may see their favorite newsgroup overrun with meaningless off-topic advertisements, obscuring any effective information still remaining in that newsgroup. When a Online Solutions customer performs one of these abusive activities, Online Solutions pays a price as well. The additional time we have to spend responding to the complaints that pour in could be much better served doing other tasks here.
Complaints do indeed pour in.
Even if someone is using the services of another ISP to send out SPAM or UCE advertising their Online Solutions web site, we will get complaints. Our system is robust enough to escape most of this type of activity, but you can see that in a case like this, the effect would be that of one rogue user spoiling the party for everyone. Because of the potential consequences of this type of activity, Online Solutions has never taken a liking to this type of behavior by our customers. In the past however, we have given people the benefit of the doubt, assuming they didn't know that their actions could have such unwanted effects. If we received a complaint about a Online Solutions user abusing the Internet, our standard practice had been to warn the user that further behavior of this type would result in termination of their account.