Here's one of the real kickers with ISPs: if they restrict your bandwidth due to your torrenting activities, you can just downgrade to their lowest level services.
My current ISP was bought up by another one. The TOS then changed automatically which it could always since they reserve the right to change terms without notice (it's the customers' responsibility to read the TOS). If you don't buy the premium plans, all the other internet service plans have time limits. Because the former plan I was on at the former ISP wasn't their premium-priced plan, the new company simply tweaked my plan's TOS to include a 5000 minute per month connection time. That way, they still advertise it as unlimited. So, your idea of downgrading is good, but in this case, the ISP is twisting my arm to upgrade.
The new TOS reminds me of the old
Three Stooges joke of all you can eat restaurants. You go in to the restaurant and when you try to get a 2nd serving of something, the company employee tells you "You already received service. That is all you can eat." Unlimited in this context simply means they didn't tell you the actual limits for every context. It's a business-friendly interpretation of the TOS. Now, all that remains is for EVERY company to adopt similar policies and then there will be no alternatives for the customer to choose from in order to avoid this.
Free enterprise is about making money, so I cannot fault them for wanting to make as much money as they can from me. Businesses are soulless entities out there to make money; they are not there to take care of people-oriented problems unless you pay them to do that for you. If they wanted to get a law passed that stated I must give them 120 trillion dollars per second, I would have to agree or be called a communist by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for taking sides against a corporation. That sounds rediculous now, but at what point is it a serious matter that goes beyond profit-making and into abuse? 10% of the way there? 20% of the way there? There's no hope to avoid the ISP's onerous approach in my area except to go to Comcast. Verizon FiOS won't come in due to lack of enough new customer density to repay them for their troubles. It used to be that comcast was the "bad guy" around here for their frequent support of intellectual property lawsuit letters (they act as the agent for the intellectual property holders for certain titles because comcast is part owner of quite a bit of intellectual property via some of its subsidiaries). But when other companies leapfrog past after consumers become used to the existing customer rights environment's status quo, it is particularly annoying for those who remember how things used to be before so many business-friendly legal changes were made and federal regulations changed or removed to allow businesses to do as they pleased with wordings, definitions, etc.
how do you sue a mega-corporation without getting shushed by money or getting silenced by a hired goon >,> that is if they're shady enough to go off-court.
They don't have to go that far. All they need to do is cow you thru fear of losing your job. The cowing is made much easier if you are a wage slave or don't have extensive financial reserves. I have a first hand example of this kind of justice attempted upon me. I was sole remaining independent witness of the event where a wealthy influential man ran the red light and hitting another car. He became the defendant in a lawsuit since there was enough evidence after I gave witness. I then received unsavory dirty-tactics pressure to withdraw my sworn signed statements. If I didn't testify for the prosecution, then they would stop putting negative pressures on my reputation and my employment. That included dirty tactics to show I was drunk which I am not as I don't drink even at company employee private socials. They subpoenaed club card records from various stores to see if anyone in the family buys alcohol or drugs that can impair driving. Pretty dirty of them trying to discredit a witness that way. They tried other tactics which might work on a normal person, but I was safe because I was safe and clean due to my high security clearance which regularly checks up on me, where I travel, etc. Someone was sent to watch me, but that failed as I live in a secure, gated community where guests have to be invited in or usually they get rejected because there is no "come in and browse for the person's residence". Because we also own the half-mile of public road just to get to our entrance, they cannot even sit there and wait outside the main gate before the police get called to make them leave or be cited. So, if you run afoul of a wealthy or influential entity, you might get a lot of negative pressure to not do the right thing if they are arrogant about their own sense of justice. The small guy might win, but usually it is the wealthy influential person that wins regardless of the merits of the situation. It cost me to do the right thing in this case, which was what the rich person's defense wanted to do. I guess statistically, that tactic works for the defense goon team that rich person hired, but they weren't able to overcome in this one case. Darn it all, it dragged on for two years before being resolved in the prosecution's favor. It's appalling how long and how many depositions and people were involved from the government legal system on the rich defendant's behalf. I say the influential person abused the common taxpayer in this case. Is the opposite situation possible? Probably not. In my metro area, three rich kids going out to harass homeless people by beating them (they took weapons and at least one baseball bat) finally managed to kill a homeless person and only one of them got cited and then only for serving 70+ hours of community service and was allowed to do the community service by working at one of his father's companies. Important to note that these kids went out to harass homeless as a repeat thing. In the plea bargain, the defense for the one kid stated that it would be wrong to ruin this child's future life with incarceration or a criminal record. Evidently, the city prosecutor (republican) listened to that and agreed because the plea bargain offer was pretty generous in my opinion. That's the difference in value a person has in the USA?
