I do: the answer is basically no. ISPs who have thought this through for
more than 5 minutes will make you sign something saying you can't put up
something that gets lots and lots of server hits (I've seen the contract
language); the ones who haven't will make up similar rules on the fly the
first time it happens to them. Universities can afford to be a bit more
loose about this (or maybe not, but at least in the early days of the web
they were), since they've got bandwidth for 30,000 users anyway, but your
basic ISP buying bandwidth for its 1000 customers will not sit still and
take 5000 hits to your page each day (and neither will penny-pinching
megacorps like AOL). It takes the same amount of bandwidth to "hit in" or
"hit out", and they aren't going to double their line-leasing fees out of
the goodness of their hearts (or more than double, if say more than one
user decides to put up a popular webzine).
Sure, the population of the Internet will act as a natural governor on
the maximum number of simultaneously popular sites, but any single ISP is
still perfectly justified in playing "not in my backyard". If you want
to be a big net presence, you've pretty much got to buy your own servers
and lines.
Of course, the open question is, "OK, that's true now, but at some point
in the future it has to scale better, as cheap bandwidth and computer
space/power will increase". But to repeat JP, I don't know. There's no
obvious reason why the required bandwidth of the evolving web medium
won't keep on chasing the bandwidth of the Internet forever, just as
entertainment software has spent the last 7-8 years chasing the $3000
computers purchased in the previous 6 months from any time t.
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu