Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net

Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.

Comments

Re:Tired of getting screwed by the cable industry?

[Helter]

Well, we can thank the new FCC chairman/media bitch for what we're about to go through. Instead of enforcing the precedent of forcing communications lines to be "rentable" he's decided that internet access is an information service instead of a communication service (or some semantic game like that) which basically allows the major ISPs to have as close to a monopoly as possible.

bits and bytes

[Barbarian]

A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."

20 Kbps * 60 s * 1 B/8b = 150 kB/min
that means 568 hours worth..

I assume he was talking about kilobits, because the next paragraph talks about most good net stations being 56k...either that or the people writing the article messed it up.

Your post is way off, dude

[thatguywhoiam]

... because I am seeing it first-hand.

If you'd (wait for it!...) read the article you would have seen the example given in Canada; Sympatico, run by Bell, has recently done this very thing. 5 GB cap. Go over the limit.. and they dock ya.

I personally know a few people who were incensed enough about this to flee to the only other broadband provider in Canada, Rogers... which also has a tiered plan in effect. The difference is that Rogers will pinch the connection after a certain data-rate has been sustained for an unspecified period of time (basically warez kiddies snarking something off LimeWire). But it's not capped. Thus, the lesser of two evils.

But yeah, it's real today.

Re:This is nothing new.

[ninewands]

Quoth the poster:

As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.

... and if the blockage point is your ISPs gateway to the backbone, how do you propose to route around that? A proxy MIGHT work unless they are using something like the Packeteer Packetshaper to control traffic.

I know this because I recently had to pry some straight answers out of Time-Warner/Roadrunner on behalf of my boss's boss's boss (He and I are both RR customers). It seems the Dean (yes, I work at an edu) wanted to work from home, including mounting the Windows shares on our NT domain. Time-Warner swore up and down that they did not have the netbios ports blocked until I identified myself as a customer and demanded to speak to security because I could prove that the Level I tech was lying to me. I had port-scanned my box at home and it showed 137, 138 and 139 in state 'filtered' (this is a Linux box without Samba installed, so blocking by RR is the ONLY way I could have gotten that result).

They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) and will STAY that way, and that the only way the Dean could get them unblocked is to buy a commercial account and a static IP (for which RR charges $130.00/month) (which the Dean considers a Really Bad Thing(TM)).

I told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP and whether they should get cable internet or DSL.

Re:Evidence?

[alienw]

JUst for your info, fcc has no oversight on cable. FTC does. FCC is airwaves, FTC is trade.

Have you been living in a cave?

[from http://www.fcc.gov/mb/]
"The Media Bureau develops, recommends and administers the policy and licensing programs relating to electronic media, including cable television, broadcast television, and radio in the United States and its territories. The Media Bureau also handles post-licensing matters regarding Direct Broadcast Satellite service."

Re:If they (the cable companies) keep this up...

[Animats]

We had one here, the Palo Alto Cable Co-Op. This was the only cable provider in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Atherton for years. Its managers cut a deal with AT&T to sell it out to AT&T at a low price, while keeping their jobs. The Co-Op was in heavy debt, but probably could have gotten out of that in time. The members voted to sell out, and now they regret it.

Re:How to ISP's carry newsgroups?

[kmellis]

"How do the ISP's get away with providing these, and more importantly, WHY?"

USENET is a peer-to-peer network that is still exemplary of the decentralized, democratic values that were at the core of the burgeoning Internet culture. As such, administrators have tried to be "hands off" as much as possible. In particular, the alt heirarchy exists specifically to provide a medium for almost completely unrestricted content. More to the point, in the spirit of the purpose of the alt heirarchy, additions of groups to the alt heirarchy are largely propogated by default. This is significant for a reason I'll explain in a moment.

As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.

Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".

One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.

And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.

Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)

Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.

(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)

DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.