But we all "sign" these agreements anyway and it's no wonder. You could wait months for broadband to come to your neighborhood, weeks for the installers to show up, and days for them to correctly install your equipment. So now you're mere seconds away from launching into the rarefied air of high-speed Internet services, and the odds of you bailing out because of the quasi-legal claptrap in an AUP are next to nil. You click on "Accept" and forget about it. Only now that you've accepted the terms, your ISP has a long list of justifications for cutting off your connection if it's in its best interest to do so.

Until recently, AUPs haven't been a big cause for worry. But with the consolidation of broadband service providers, telcos and ISPs, the terms of usage have gotten less liberal and more specific. Where there once were vague statements, there now are stringent dicta. Because they can change the details anytime they like, ISPs steal clauses as if they have Stephen Ambrose on the payroll. In time, broadband agreements became bloated -- e.g., prohibiting users from reselling access or putting up local servers on these cheap connections. In Napster's wake, copyright violations have been banned (as if stealing would have been OK otherwise).

Now the largest providers are explicitly prohibiting all varieties of business applications. Comcast Corp. raised the AUP stringency bar in mid-2000 by banning residential users from putting up VPNs or interconnecting LANs over their networks, while restricting use to the residential portion of a mixed home/office environment. In late 2001, AT&T Broadband, which (as of this writing) plans to merge with Comcast, abruptly stopped providing static IP addresses as Excite@Home collapsed. It then prohibited users from employing software that would map static IP addresses onto the dynamic addresses it assigns -- making it much more difficult, if not impossible, for users to configure VPNs.

AUPs have rarely been enforced, but that's starting to change. Service providers now are issuing warnings to users as they discover violations. Business users are told to purchase a higher-end package, at twice the price, or face being disconnected. While some people will pay the difference, lots of folks will simply take evasive action. For example, users can tunnel VPN protocols over alternate ports to hide the traffic.

A few people argue that the real criminals here are the cable companies attempting to gouge customers by marking up basic services for business consumption, even when the underlying technology remains the same. Certainly, if we had local broadband competition these policies couldn't survive. But no statute says cable companies can't restrict usage, and business customers have long subsidized residential users. Service providers are in business to make a profit (the past several years notwithstanding), and they'll do whatever they can to make the apparently miserable business of being a communications provider into a viable enterprise again.

What can you do? Warn your extortionist provider that you'll leave at the first alternative. Tell your state regulatory agency that business restrictions are monopolistic activity. You should expect to pay more for business-grade services, but fight for value.