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Senators Call For Hearing On Carrier Content Blocking
HangingChad writes "Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones. Now that the Senate is getting into the act, Comcast will probably want to come up with some new talking points as their old ones were leaked."
Fine by me. As long as Comcast and company are open and clear about what they're doing. That's the sort of industry regulation I'm in favor of -- require it to be very clear to consumers exactly what service they're buying, and require the provider to actually provide the service as advertised. If, with all parties aware of what's happening, Comcast wants to sell a bittorrent-limiting service, and customers want to buy it, then more power to them.
I like to call Comcast, Fraudcast. When I had service with them I took me six months to get a bill that was for the service that I originally ordered. Each month I would explain that I didn't order/want/get/use the extra services they were charging me for (like digital cable). Each month they would assure me that they had fixed the billing problems and my next bill would be correct. Rinse and repeat for six months. To top it off, when I moved and switched to DSL (no problems with verizon billing in over a year) they send my account to a collection agency when they owed me money. I also seemed to have very frequent network outages too. Don't know if that was a first generation attempt to reduce peoples bandwidth usage. My own experience using Fraudcast is that they throttled anything I did that required any bandwidth what so ever. I would start with a very high download rate and about 30 sec in always get cut back to something stupid like 8 kbs. I wasn't even on Bit torrent when that happened. Just my 2 cents.
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I think somebody explained if they can turn off bittorrent, they can selectively limit (or spy on) anything they want to. Many congress critters might not understand internet, but they understand the idea of open communications and what it means even if companies are starting with "bad guy". This could go either way though. On one hand it could put a stop to things like private cell only SMS and web as well as blocking services on DSL or Cable like bittorrent. On the other hand, it could be the "foot in the door" for regulations... the RIAA could step in and get a regulation for dangerous pirates and then it quietly becomes 100% legal and consumers argue about the details. That's how these big companies work, they know how to get a small concession as law and parlay that into making what they want "official" mandate for whatever they want to do. If somebody explains "net neutrality" as "reading your email" while transferring it then congress might get the hint. Bittorrent is a bad choice to argue about because it's more like bait to allow filtering than fight it.
ISPs, fiber owners have built the lines with PUBLIC funding, on PUBLIC property. they DO NOT own the lines. it is totally illegal. they have no controlling rights as to public's usage. if they had built them with their OWN money on the land THEY owned, it would be legal. it is not as such.
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I call them Comcastaway, Comcastoff, or ComcastdownintothedepthsofHades ... in any event they're a schlock outfit. I used to have a 4 mbit/sec symmetric connection under @Home, and that was damn near ten years ago. Truly useful broadband, in fact. AT&T Broadband took it over and cut me back to 1.5 mbit/sec with a 30 kbit/sec backchannel. Things are much better though, under Comcast. Now I have an asymmetric connection with "no server" restrictions (hah! as if if 80 kbits/sec makes for much of a server), hidden bandwidth caps and now the bastards are deliberately forging TCP headers and corrupting legitimate traffic.
Pathetic.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
However, given barriers to entry (last-milers don't have to open their infrastructure to competition), it is far from being a free, open market.
If this were a little ISP with a totally privately-owned infrastructure, I'd agree with you.
It's not, its' a huge one, with monopoly-like size and operating on concessions and right-of-ways granted by the people in order to let them to operate their business for the benefit of all.
They aren't just blocking, or censoring.. they are actively forging traffic to appear as if it is something it is not in order to trick software into not functioning as the end users expect it to.
If you don't want your customers running bittorrent, put it in the contract and ban it. If you don't want them using over X bandwidht, put it in the contract. That's fair play (maybe)
What's definitely NOT fair play is lying about it to your customers, then sneakily killing connections and then lying about it.
For the same reason, your phone company cannot refuse to send your calls to another phone just because it doesn't approve of the content.
Here's the best part that no one seems to have mentioned, but ComCast is 100% telling the truth. Please read their WORDING.
I read that Comcast is limiting customer access to BitTorrent. Is this true?Respond:
No. We do not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent. We also respect our customers' privacy and don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.
Note that ComCast states that they "do not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent" (emphasis mine). They do NOT at all answer the question of whether they are throttling or limiting BitTorrent traffic. And if that's their standard form response to everyone, it means they can tell the truth - by simply not answering the real question (and hoping they mislead the questioner into believing they have).
It's much like the cheap hamburger patties that are made with 100% real beef - as opposed to the ones that are 100% real beef. One statement claims that the beef portion in the patties are 100% real, while the other states that the patties are 100% real beef.
Semantics is/are a wonderful thing.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Shouldn't market forces be allowed to decide whether
or not the public wants their internet and mobile
communications blocked or censored?
Most of the "market" isn't even aware there is a problem.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Another point that sibling posts haven't made in response to your idiotic remarks is that the U.S. federal government has given billions of dollars and special anti-competitive protections to these companies. At no point were the telcos operating in a marketplace free of government influence. So to suggest the market be allowed to sort out service issues is complete nonsense. There is no "market" at work here.
You may simply be too young to remember it, but there is a reason we used to joke: "We don't have to care! We're the phone company!"
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
How about actually taking some responsibility for how your democratic republic has turned out? It is still democratic. You still vote. Other people still vote. You have a voice that you can use to convince others. The failing is yours that you have allowed your democracy to become so unrepresentative.
Or is it? Perhaps people like the economic benefits of having a business-friendly government. Perhaps if it wasn't, you wouldn't have the internet connection you enjoy, or the income you enjoy, or the local infrastructure, etc, etc. Or are people not allowed to believe that, and any pro-business decisions have to be a result of corruption?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Very accurate. I never saw anything in there was an out-right denial of throttling traffic. Phrases like "individual user" translate to "we watch everyone, as a whole". Website tracking... that is wrong, and they don't do it. They do watch packets, because that is what they are concerned with- moving packets. I smell a rat...
It may, in some sense, be literally true, but Cocmast's statement amount to little more than Equivocation.Keep in mind we impeached a President over the same kind of equivocation, for an issue far less material then Comcast's one.
Which is part of the reason why everyone's so mad - Comcast has been caught with the cigar in the dame, its time for them to come clean (which they should have done even before they were caught).
You should be asking, "Have you stopped blocking BitTorrent?" (like the old "Have you stopped beating your wife" question).
Have gnu, will travel.
This reply is not so much directed at you as the doctrine of free market. Many people bring forth the argument that the free market can solve all the problems the plague the economic interactions of humanity. However, one thing that most people don't pay attention to is that caveat emptor (buyer beware) is only possible when the buyer is fully aware of the product or service they are purchasing. Since big corporations tend to keep as much of their business behind closed doors as possible, and indeed often blatantly falsify their goods, then the buyer can not make a truly informed decision and thus the hand of big government must be put to use to ensure that the populace is not taken unfair advantage of. I am all for getting rid of big government, but only so long as any provider must be completely transparent with respect to their actions in providing me with services or goods.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
I did. They say they're not limiting customer access to BitTorrent, but they are. That's not 100-percent truth, in my book.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Comcast et al built their infrastructrure with public money on public land, and now government regulation allows them to not share it with anybody else. There are huge barriers of entry for others to build alternative infrastructure alongside. This means that many of the providers have a natural monopoly in a given area, and a de-facto monopoly down to cost in others.
The free market can only operate in the absence of monopolies, which is why there needs to be regulation. Government created the regional monopolies in the first place, it's government responsibility to fix them so that customers do indeed have a free market choice. The US government should require open-access at cost to wires laid across public land or with public money, allowing a raft of competitors at the 'last-mile' level. That would then allow customers to descriminate between providers. Without open-access and competition, regulation is the only thing preventing customers in a monopoly area from being screwed.
BT, the near monopoly phone company in the UK, has to provide access at fair cost to it's exchange based DSL infrastructure; at the same rate it's own ISP subsidiary pays. Or, companies can put their own equipment into BT's exchanges, and take over the running of BT's 'last mile' copper phone line to the house. There's been a lot on consolidation in the UK ISP market lately, due to race-to-the-bottom service levels; but due to competition, I was able to switch from my previous DSL provider when they started throttling to one that didn't. I believe that many in the US don't have that choice.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Of course.
And part of market forces is aggressively identifying when a marketer is lying about what they are selling.
And part of market forces is trying to get them fined if they are engaging in fraud.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is too much like Douglas Adams' "...they were in the bottom drawer of a locked filing cabinet, stuck upside-down, in a disused toilet with a sign on the door saying 'BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD!...'"
Companies are more than willing to display advertising promoting a product in 10000 point, red, bold font while putting the nasties in Swahili 1.5 point italics semi-transparent ink on the back page of the ad.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
A few things. Comcast can't exactly detect encrypted traffic. They can detect protocols and formats that are known to use encryption; but, perhaps that's what you meant. But imagine if VPN' takes some data, encrypts it, then stegos it within *other* protocols. Now, Comcast can continue to claim they block bittorrent. But, VPN' + bittorrent can get through fine.
Comcast is acting to censor/block because the cost/benefit analysis shows it in their advantage. Yet by blocking content, they've shown they have the capacity to block other content, even if that means hiring many employees to create an acceptable cache of the internet. "It's not cost effective" isn't a defense against a crime. If it were, stores would ignore carding smokers and drinkers and obtaining a liquor license without fear of prosecution.
ISPs aren't common carriers. Even if they were, the act of interfering with the content carried in any way shows a willingness to be held responsible for that which makes it through. Forgetting the whole "child pornography" angle, if the RIAA/MPAA/whoever sues one of Comcast's customers for copyright infringement over bittorrent carried content, the fact that Comcast only decides to slow/stop traffic after they "use too much" isn't going to be any defense against contributory copyright infringement. As you pointed out, they can easily distinguish and block bittorrent.
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