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FCC Complaint Filed Over Comcast P2P Blocking
Enter Sandvine writes "A handful of consumer groups have filed a complaint with the FCC over Comcast's "delaying" some BitTorrent traffic. The complaint seeks fines of $195,000 for each Comcast subscriber affected by the traffic blocking as well as a permanent injunction barring the ISP from blocking P2P traffic. '"Comcast's defense is bogus," said Free Press policy director Ben Scott. "The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast's blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws.""
If the FCC takes effective action on this complaint, then they are effectively mandating net neutrality as part of their remit, so no law would be needed.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Comcast getting fined is the kind of thing that needs to happen. Normally I'm against FCC fines, Howard Stern gets fined for saying the same thing Oprah does. Here, like Oprah I doubt the FCC will pursue this.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Now, with that said, there is one option that could be taken now that Net Neutrality has been brought into this.
I see from the PDF that the people filing this complaint are from Washington, DC. It probably should have been filed in New York with the demands specifying only NY victims for the time being. Why might you ask NY? Well, it's the only state to have established net neutrality as a telecommunications standard (See 16 NYCRR Part 605). And this case is exactly the definition of what those standards are put in place to protect!
So while it may have had to be filed with the FCC, the real place where you could pretty much guaranty a (maybe even court case) win against Comcast is in the state of New York. I know they provide service there and I think it would be more prudent to first prove your point there, then file a complaint to the FCC from New York after the local government has awarded the victims there.
In my opinion, a guaranteed sure win in a small battle is bigger than a huge uncertainty in the overall war.
My work here is dung.
Someone says this on every single article relating to traffic shaping, QoS, or filtering. Somehow this one even got a +5 Insightful (at one point), despite being based on an invalid premise. ISPs are not common carriers. The line-level divisions of the telecommunications companies are common carriers. The divisions relating to actual Internet service, and other non-telco ISPs like Comcast, are "information carriers" (or some such label) and not subject to common-carrier regulations. The ISPs don't want to be common carriers; they're much better off as they are. You can't threaten them with withdrawing a regulatory status they never had and never wanted.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They should have made their complaint more clear cut from the common industry practice of QOS.
spoofing packets to intentionally interrupt a connection is very different of course, but the way they present it, using the term "degrading", is not specific enough.
"interrupting" is more accurate, and more egregious.
Comcast will likely use the long time case of QOS to weasel out of it, harming the credibility of an honestly legitimate gripe.
If they can't weasel out of it, this could put QOS in danger, resulting in terrible performance of voip, streaming video, vpn, online gaming, and other latency sensitive applications.
In their justifiable zealotry they did not put their complaint through the proper egghead QA channels, and not only may the entire net neutrality cause may suffer for it, but even a "win" may ultimately be a harm.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Every time something like this comes up, there is a cacophony of geekdom crying out tripe about "common carrier" status without any understanding about what those words *mean*.
Do we not ridicule politicians who make laws based on their completely boneheaded ideas about what technology means ("tubes", anyone?)? Do we not loathe judges who rule in favor of the "MAFIAA" due to their complete lack of even elementary comprehension of what is involved in, say, *watching* a DVD? Do we not scoff at the astonishingly anemic attempts to create engaging television and movie plots out of programming and information security? Do we not groan inwardly (and some of us, outwardly) when a reporter tarnishes the good name that was "hacker"?
If we're going to claim to be anything better than those who speak from ignorance, let us cease with the "common carrier" whine until such point as we know what it *means*!
It is acceptable to give a big Skywalkerian whine about the "system" that lets a huge corporation own separately regulated subsidiaries, with some being "telecommunications services" subject to "common carrier" laws and others being "information services" not included in "common carrier" laws. (Whining to elected officials may not be any more productive, but then again, it would be the proper venue.) On the other hand, whining here while not even bothering to know what you're whining about? That makes you ignorant, and if the trend I pointed out above is any indicator, we don't abide ignorance here.
(Guess I should've used the rant markup, but I couldn't remember whether it was supposed to be SGML, XML, OOpsXML, or what, so it likely wouldn't validate even if I did.)
This will just encourage comcast to say, "You're right, here is what it costs us" and establish a new class of service and adjust ToS. Its no longer net neutrality if its not part of the package. Jumping from $60 - $600/month to have isn't worth it to me. Premium dedicated bandwidth is like $200 per Mbps for sustained traffic. How much is BT worth to you?
I expect this will go nowhere or just like everything else, comes back to bite the consumer.
I think the people that do have a valid case is people not on Comcast receiving fake packets from Comcast. Comcast can pretend that they have the right to send fake packets on there own network, but to send them to other networks? I don't think so.
It is technically a D.O.S. attack against people not even on there network.
shaky legal ground? "tame" playboy?
I think you either have that wrong or you need to clarify.
Bittorrent is not on shaky legal ground, it is a valid peer to peer file transfer protocol which is used for legal purposes. I've transfered many gigs of bits in downloading and sharing Fedora and Ubuntu linux distros, I've also used it to download commercial game demos such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. By your logic the entire internet is on shaky legal ground because all sorts of illegal activities traverse the backbone, does that mean we should shut down the entire internet?
And I'd hardly call Larry Flynt a "tame" playboy. (happy birthday Larry) And I'd also go further and say that the work Larry has done to protect his own free speech for works that many find distasteful has protected the free speech of others who have something much less morally questionable to communicate than the magazines Larry publishes. I believe that was the basis of Larry's arguements, if his free speech is restricted then where does it stop, do we restrict people from pointing out fraud and questionable deeds of governments and corporations. His objective was not to ensure there was free speech for something hardcore even though it would be protected as well, his objective was to protect free speech, period.
I download linux iso's daily, and legal torrents all day long. This type of bandwithing hogging is fucking cocksucking bullshit.
First off before I even get to the throttling, we are the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and we lag so behind in other countries in bandwith speed, and comcast has literally done NOTHING in their long term plan to provide more bandwith speed. They are milking their shitty lines for every Americans last penny. Its corporate greed at its finest. Big brother setting his hand in there to make sure im not taking up to much bandwith that I PAY FOR and limiting my legal torrents download speed.
EAT A DICK
and yet strangely, they don't have to pay as much for downstream traffic.. Seems it would be more efficient to re-route the trackers to look to local clients on their network.. IE, if I want to download ubuntu, I would consider it a benefit if they pointed me to someone else on their network that was seeding, or further along downloading, as I could finish it faster.. And they wouldn't have duplicated traffic coming through their gateway pipes.
They could have manipulated things in a way that would be a win for all, but they chose to do it in a way that was a win for them.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Gah - you know when someone pulls out that phrase, you will soon see idiocy camouflaged with high-falutin' language.
The poster is correct - bandwidth is not an unlimited commodity, since there is no such thing as an unlimited commodity. Comcast, etc, attempted to pretend that it was in their advertising campaign by promising the impossible -- unlimited bandwidth. In a sane world, they contractually obligated themselves to bankruptcy by their fraud, hoping that the price in bandwidth costs would always outpace bandwidth usage growth, instead of actually advertising what limitations they could afford.
And now we get all kinds of sophistry to defend them. Obviously, you have to have some form of bandwidth cap. You could do it by total bandwidth monthly or weekly, you could degrade bulk services at high demand (and state it openly in your terms) or you could drop high-bandwidth users (and state it openly in your terms).
But they're the ones who have f*cked up, and want to have their cake and eat it too. They're the ones who still have "Unlimited Bandwidth!!!" ads at the malls still today.
This is no tragedy of the commons. There's no abuse because contractual obligations are lacking and oversight is limited to traditional norms. This is a case of explicit contractual obligations that are clearly delineated, where "property rights" are quite obvious, where private entities aren't sharing but are trading. It's just that one of those entities is much larger than the rest of the partners, and that entity is simply trying to defraud their partners by promising what they can't deliver.
Libertarian language is just so Orwellian.
No, you'd still need a law because FCC policy can change at the FCC's (not the public's) whim.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sounds like you are just doing a bunch of downloading, using your connection mainly for push-at-you content and VOIP. They will get around to trampling the VOIP that's not their own pretty soon, but it sounds like it's working ok for you right now. Your usage sounds kind of high, but before long Comcast will be approaching those television networks and other content providers with their hands out, looking for a little more money from them. Because basically you're what Comcast wants - a good consumer.
Yes, it seems Comcast is fine with the downloads using BT. Apparently you didn't check to see if you are helping with contributing bandwidth (you do know that Ubuntu is supported solely through contributions from the community, don't you?) when you were running those BT downloads. You probably just waited for the download to finish, then closed BT right away. If you had left it up for a while, you would have noticed that the peers trying to connect with you to share those files were sent barely a trickle of data, and then got bumped off. That's what Comcast is doing to BT now.
We are participating, sharing, and contributing. But Comcast is interfering with us. They don't want us to have a voice. They just want us to sit back and take what they're sending.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia