Your customers definitely believed they would receive internet access paid for from their rent, and if you change that while still holding to a lease it will upset them. Legalistic mumbo jumbo like claiming they paid for "network access" rather than internet access would't actually fly in court if you ever do face a class action lawsuit or FTC complaint about this. The expectation you intended for your customer is what matters, not your ridiculous word games. Most students would probably be too busy with other things to take action over this, so if your tenants really are all students you won't face civil action.

But this kind of move is bad for other reasons. The bad blood it will generate between you and your customers will incur other kinds of costs as your customers act out passive-aggressively against you, in the form of poor yelp reviews, poor word of mouth, and deliberate property destruction. This is just the kind of short-sighted nonsense I've come to expect from many businessmen. Absolutely no conception of the big picture. Providing this access is very inexpensive, and you said you'd do it when you rented the apartments. By changing it up you are saying to your customers that you don't value their time and that you don't take them seriously. You just want to use them to extort money from someone else.

Moreover, this action is not sustainable. If you and enough others to this, you will be seeing net neutrality and other consumer protection regulations in the future as a result. Most college students don't stay in college forever.

Just like how any corporation will run out of employees when their current crop retire.

There's nothing special about Microsoft products that makes them business compatible. That's been a ridiculous nonsense talking point for selling Microsoft's overpriced bloatware for far too long. The people running corporations are stuck in the '80s and believe they need to use MSFT because they were sold on that scam 3 decades ago. But those dinosaurs won't be running things forever. Soon younger CEOs with a more intelligent approach to IT procurement will be in charge.

I don't know why it's taking people so long to realize this. The NSA records everything they can get their hands on. And thanks to the USS Jimmy Carter they can get their hands on all terrestrial communications.

I don't think there are a lot of people who don't use Netflix. At least, I don't know any.

If it makes you feel better, they aren't using it just to get attention. They're using it gain notoriety and legitimacy so they can scam property owners out of money by offering fake prospecting services.

The company hasn't released enough information for you to know it's bullshit. Scientists aren't supposed to debunk things by saying "well I've never heard of anything like that so it must be impossible." Science has a hard time advancing in a climate like that.

That said, they haven't proven any of their claims. If they had done any of the things they said they've done on their website, they would tell you who their customer was so you could look them up and ask them if it was true. Basic fact-checking like that is a requirement of true journalism. If the company refuses to provide any evidence, the journalist should report the claims as being highly suspicious and call attention to the fact that the company has been unwilling to provide evidence of their claims. Unfortunately, this kind of basic work has been replaced by reporters taking claims made by scammers like this at face value and reporting them as fact.

What the law literally says doesn't really matter in a case like this. Even if the police would ask the prosecutor to bring charges against you (which they wouldn't) there's no jury on the earth dumb enough to to take the letter of the law more seriously than their own sense of justice. And even if there were, there are few criminals bold enough to report a crime like this to the police, since they'd likely face jail time as a result of it.

It's not wrong to retrieve stolen property.

I can understand wanting a free market system to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons types of issues with Netflix customers causing other non-streaming subscribers to get worse performance

Non-streaming subscribers?! How many internet users are there really who don't stream video? Isn't that the reason people buy the top-tier internet connections? It seems more like a case of ISPs not wanting to render services their customers have already paid for. Or it's a case of ISPs who also happen to own content providers, working to promote their content over a competitor's content. Either way, the ISP is abusing their position to screw over their customers.

It's the same kind of anti-compeditive bullshit we've seen time and time again in the US. There is definitely something wrong with the way the government works that they keep allowing abusive monopolies to spring up with every new technological innovation.

I'm driving over to Gander Mountain first to grab a gun!

Do you think it might be easier for someone to disarm the public if all their guns are consolidated like that?

Printer manufacturers use the same pricing model (they lose money on the printer and make it back with the ink/toner). You tend to see this anywhere a product is tied to a single recurring cost that can some from a monopoly provider. If it were legal for a real-estate developer to sell a house at a loss and gouge you on utilities, you can bet they'd do that too.

Blocking access to a service someone has paid for is "damage." The extent of the injury is mostly financial, and hard to quantify because there are a lot of injured parties who were effected over a two year period (none of whom will actually be receiving compensation). However, it easily could have contributed to personal injury and it would be very hard to know.

The purpose of the fine is not to compensate the injured parties, that would be very hard to do. It is meant to dissuade him and others from undertaking these kind of activities in the future. The jamming was a nuisance and a potential hazard.

Cars are screened for safety before they are allowed on the road, there are a number of safety regulations manufacturers have to meet before they can legally sell a car. Manufacturers are required to recall and remediate defects when they become aware of them, and they are fined if they fail to do so, so this isn't a double standard. Unfortunately, car manufactures sometimes learn of defects from accidents, and they don't always report them. That is a crime, it is not legal for them to do that. But sometimes they do get away with it, much the same way this asshole got away with operating a jammer for two years.

Do advertisers own TV and radio stations?

This this a trick question? I suppose technically they don't, but for all practical purposes they certainly do.

I really doubt our founding fathers had protecting junk mailers in mind when they penned the Constitution. I don't want to receive junk mail, and I don't know anyone who does. I doubt there even is such a person. Even junk mailers probably hate receiving junk mail. I'm happy to pay FexEX or UPS to carry my mail, they do a fine job and they can get it there tomorrow morning. I only send a few letters a year, and several dollars isn't much in that context. The claim that private businesses can't do parcel delivery as efficiently as the USPS is absurd. The USPS is totally obsolete. We don't need them for anything at all.