[kitteh]

When I worked at a large telco/broadband provider in the 90s and onward such concepts of selling this data was forbidden and you'd get funny looks for suggesting it. Our leadership chain - comprised of a mixture of long tenured employees with mostly engineering backgrounds supported not wanting to sell this data as well. It wasn't until the mid 2000s when our leadership got swapped out with younger executives who'd do 2 year rotations across the company and were looking to do a fast big bang to wow others that would go down this road. It wasn't just selling data this new gang wanted, but DNS redirection (think for nxdomains), and ad insertion thru TCP seassion hijacking platforms. There were a number of startups who were happy to give us free gear to sniff & manipulate customer traffic and we'd get a cut of the ad money.