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FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."
Given the recent stories related to chairman Kevin Martin, one has to wonder if this is fitting a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense or just that cable companies havent kept up their "lobbying" efforts or stepped on some toes.
I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I am a Comcast subscriber, and I really resent that they charge me 50+ BUX per month for "unlimited" internet, but when I want to download a linux installation DVD via BitTorrent, I can't.
I really do not see the Republican controlled FCC doing anything about this, however it is a good start to at least say they are investigating.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
/fingers crossed
.iso of Ubuntu is enough to choke me all day long.
I really hope something comes of this... I think it could go either way really, the FCC could certainly side Comcast on the issue. But even if we could get some more truth in advertising in the business I would be happy. Let people know what services you intend to affect.
Or my personal favorite, not knowing how much bandwidth you're payments actually cover. About half way through the afternoon I drop to 1/6th to 1/8th my 'normal' bandwidth. Till midnight and BAM full speed again... And believe me it don't take much, one DVD
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I can't believe people around here still believe that they can blame government corruption and stupidity on Republicans. Since the democrats have taken back congress if anything congress has gotten worse on these issues. Where before we would have bills sponsored by a bunch of republicans with maybe a few democrats, and a bunch of democrats opposing it just because they hate republicans, now we have bunches of democrats sponsoring some of the most blatantly stupid and corrupt bills I have ever seen, and bunches of republicans backing them.
I'm on Comcast, I have a normal residential account afaik, but I can download torrents fine. Pretty speedy too.
I don't doubt some people are having problems but how is it I'm not?
Username taken, please choose another one.
"I tell the staff that they should act on all of those complaints and investigate all of them," Martin said.
Well, I guess they're right on top of things, huh. Yep.
$195,000 per affected subscriber? Wow! Comcast won't be able to afford that 160mbps network upgrade if that occurs.
This should be an interesting story to watch unfold. Let's see how Comcast denies and hides it. Too bad this isn't a class action suit that would return some of that money to the victims... I mean customers. Maybe a class action suit will follow if or when the FCC finds Comcast guilty.
We could get a Democrat FCC that would demand ISPs block all p2p traffic at the behest of the entertainment industry. While they hedge their bets with some Republican donations, they tend to give about two to three times as much money to Democrats.
Yes, the biggest government whores for the entertainment industry are generally Democrats, led by Berman and Hollings (the latter thankfully recently retired).
having been part of the original research with DSLreports.com, I'm glad this is finally coming around to something. They have been abusing this for far too long, and if FCC takes action it will be an interesting power check to comcast. Of course, we could be wrong, and they could suddenly and magically lobby the hell out of things to prevent this, unfortunately.
I am greatful at least this will be investigated before Docsis3, not after.
China. Burma. Comcast.
Seriously, if private near-monopolies can decide what we can and cannot access on the internet, we may as well be in a de facto dictatorship. So:
Is it not becoming possible to have open networks of at-home wireless routers completely replacing the last mile anyway? Are we not near the point where big corporate gatekeepers are no longer even needed? The wireless spectrum is there, isn't it? Is it possible Google is planning some such disruptive advent?
Discuss, 'cause, I have way more questions than answers. But I dare to think they might be the right questions.
Looks like one commission got sick of their midget porn taking too long to download.
It's just about ANY peer to peer type data.
including random drops of google gtalk voice communications.
random drops of game connections.
and maybe more. those are just two i've noticed a problem with on comcast. and those two happen ALOT more often if any bit torrent downloader is running. even the damm wow updater.
its just wrong when its bit torrent. but it wont hurt anything. bit torrent keeps plugging away. but when it happens to the other apps... it's fucking annoying AND wrong.
I'm not sure why the posts in here complaining about the FCC and Comcast are receiving such low ratings from the moderator. I know some of them contain sarcasm but that's been a hallmark of Slashdot since the 1940's!
As for the FCC fining Comcast anything significant, I don't see that happening. The recent ruling to allow multiple media channel ownership in major cities and preventing states from mandating 'naked DSL' service show a government body much more concerned with corporate objectives rather than citizen interests in my perspective.
While not network neutrality per se, protocol neutrality is just as important. Traffic shaping is fine so long as it's applied to all traffic and documented in the service agreement. Comcast is proof that corporations can get away with treating Internet customers however they want when they've been granted a monopoly, which makes it the government's business to regulate them if they're going to hand out the monopolies in the first place.
This is pure eyewash. Kevin Martin's track record indicates that he never met a corporation he didn't like or a consumer who, in his judgement, didn't deserve to be shafted.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year,
Can't slip anything by those techies...
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Communistcast
Are we going to get super fast dial-up, will Comcast say that the tubes are full, will G.W Bush finally figure out how to configure that D-link router, can Obama finally add Hillary to his Myspace, and will I get to see a laptop on fire while on some ones lap.
Which division in Comcast do you work for? Must be Comcast customer service... After all, anybody who uses a decent amount of bandwidth IS a criminal and should be treated as such.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
#1 : this idea you have of a "business class connection" is from the stone age. its from back in the 90's when people would order ISDN . these days EVERY home computer should have full server connectivity. this is the modern age and if Comcast tries to create it into a separate product then they will lose to the competition...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
I agree that if you are hosting anything you really need to be using a 'business class connection', if you are using a connection for work or for anything critical you need a 'business class connection', not for the transfer rates (it seems the lowest tiers at the business level are no different from ADSL/DSL connections) but for the SLA that (should) accompany such a connection*.
In return however the ISP should provide the service being paid for. If you are paying £X for X 'Speed' with 'unlimited downloads', then that should be what you get, whether by simply browsing the web, watching on-line video, listening to on-line radio or seeding the latest Debian ISO's as a torrent (I'm seeding the whole lot at the moment because I feel I should use the bandwidth I have...).
Peer-to-peer traffic is not client-server traffic, and it is normally non commercial, and as to whether it is legitimate content being passed is not a concern of the ISP anyway (do they block spam, viral or malicious code, libellous comments? No. If there are terms and conditions attached to a service those should be clear (that way a customer can make an informed choice), there is nothing wrong with an ISP preventing end users from running a given type of server or use the connection in a certain way, but it must be clear when the user signs up.
Lastly, it is up to the Linux distributions how they distribute their ISO's, Bittorrent is perfect for this even if other methods are available and have been (and are) used, so your comment relating to how Linux should b distributed is slightly valid, but unfair and short sighted, especially given that those organisations providing Linux distributions are not all corporations so splitting the load is sensible. Bittorrent *is* used by people who wish to transfer material in breach of copyright because it is fast, practical and can be fairly anonymous but that is not its sole purpose and it is just as easy to use other methods to distribute that material as it would be to use alternate methods to distribute Linux.
People who distribute material in breach of copyright law should be punished to the full extent of the law (even if the law in question is at this point fairly insane), they are aware of the penalty's and still take the risk of doing it, but there is no good reason to ban a whole slew of technologies because they can be used to facilitate distribution. By that logic any uncontrolled storage medium that allows itself to be written to, and any uncontrolled method of data transmission should be banned, we would end up with computers that have similar multimedia capabilities as TV's (without PVR's/DVD players etc..) and radios (without a tape/MD deck), with the added benefit of having to pay for everything on a PAYG basis.
*Any Slasdhotters that have ever worked in technical support for an ISP will be familiar with calls from customers on the cheapest residential deals demanding their connection be fixed because their business relies on it, whilst simultaneously threatening lawsuits...
PS, not sure if the parent was intended as flamebait so I assumed not, and sorry for losing the plot halfway through.
Where else can I take my business. Things like cable which are natural monopolies need regulation.
But the cable companies market it as if it were.
They chose to use the term unlimited usage, and if they don't want to offer unlimited access, they should change their TOS.
There's nothing criminal or unethical about expecting a company to provide what it has promised. Some of us would be quite willing to pay, say, only $10 per month for a 1.3 Mbs connection, even if it came with a 5 GB/month transfer cap. But the cable companies won't do that. Instead, you have to buy their unlimited plan, and pay for bandwidth that you don't even use.
And the cable company will happily resell your unused bandwidth to others. It's called capacity planning, and they use statistical analysis to figure out the bandwidth that most people will actually use. Problem is, they have a financial interest in fully utilizing their equipment, i.e., buying only as much as needed. Which, when their estimates are wrong, results in lousy service for customers. Your problem is not that you are paying for someone else's bandwidth, but rather, that the cable company is making you pay for bandwidth they don't expect you to use.
Your torrent-hosting neighbor is simply using all of the bandwidth for which he paid. He's not using yours. (That is, unless he's owned your box, but that's a different thread entirely...)
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Tag it "Commiecast".
The ISP I currently use believes that the "Average" customer doesn't need more than 3GB a week to surf the internet and read email. Not much to be said about that, other than the fact that I would caution you in your dissertation of the "average customer". Remember that averages, while useful statistics, never boil down to real human behavior. And yes, I use a satellite connection in a rural area and it's the best there is right now out here. When I was in the city Adelphia was AMAZING - for $40 I had unlimited everything, and even though I was quoted 3MB down, it often ran at 5-7 and still provided a healthy (but not mind blowing) 512k-1M up.
Now let's get on to why the "average" user should care: Latency - DPI (deep packet inspection) is known to cause packet loss and latency problems. On a family member's ATT DSL I can personally attest that some websites loaded insanely slow or not at all (newegg.com, for one), while others loaded nice and fast. Routing through a proxy oddly alleviated this issue. I have the same problem with packet loss on my home ISP, where on several friends (and my old net link that my old roommates still have) these sites work fine and without lag at all.
On false positives and negatives:
"False Positives and False Negatives Although a signature is developed with the intention to uniquely and completely identify its related application or protocol, there are cases in which the signature is not robust (a.k.a. weak signature) and classification problems arise. False positives is the basic terminology referring to misclassification - or in simple terms - the likelihood that an application will be identified as something it is not. If DPI is being used for guiding a subscriber management tool, this may lead to wrongful actions. A typical example of such a wrongful action could be the mistaken lowering of priorities to time-sensitive streaming traffic and resultant introduction of unwanted latency or even packet loss. Consequently, when developing signatures, every effort must be made to achieve zero percent of false positives. A common way to strengthen a weak signature is to use a combination of more than one pattern. False negatives refers to those cases where it is not possible to consistently identify an application - sometimes the identification is classified, while other times it is missed by the classification tool. There are various reasons for this phenomenon, the most common of which is the fact that some applications can accomplish similar outcomes in several ways in different deployment scenarios. For example, some applications will behave differently if the client software operates through a proxy or firewall compared to the simpler case in which the client interacts with the web directly. Therefore, in these irregular cases, if the signature was developed under the assumption of direct communications, it is likely that the application will not be correctly classified in the case of a proxy or firewall."
(from https://www.dpacket.org/articles/digging-deeper-deep-packet-inspection-dpi )
They also take care to (briefly) mention that applications signatures can change when upgrades come out, so the ISP better have an army testing every "acceptable" bit of software out there to keep that near zero percent on the false positives.
Now I ask you.... how many "average" users operate behind a firewall? Yeah...I thought so...they gotta test that too...
Not only that but if you read the article, they think that they can convince people that they need to buy "packages" so certain traffic is prioritized, gaming, VoIP, etc. Nothing like paying your ISP not to slow your traffic down...And yes, that article is trying to sell DPI as a good thing.
Ok so finally from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_v._Comcast
Now there is also evidence of Comcast using RST p
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
i stand corrected
I hope they do. It is about time the courts started fining corporations properly, at rates that are actually preventative.
I believe Time Warner does this as well. Before they purchased Adelphia, I could use BitTorrent just fine. A month after their take over, it started. HTTP and FTP downloads were fine, bittorrent downloads would start fast and within several seconds slow down to less than dial up speed.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I hope they fine them out the ass. I use a small ISP called NTC (a part of Shentel), and they do the same thing, using an intelligent sniffing system to determine if P2P traffic is taking place and to slow it to a crawl. NTC has a monopoly on the student housing in the area, and thus get away with charging $25 per mo. per person in each apartment, disallowing routers and requiring occasional logins on an https site, and delivering ~5KB/s download for any torrent. (Usual speeds are between 100 and 150 KB/s for normal TCP connections.)
The difference is Comcast is huge, and no one cares if little NTC intentionally cripples its over-priced service and is the only available connection in all dorms, and comes pre-wired in all off-campus housing up to a few miles away.
I will be moving within the next month, and one of my considerations when looking at new homes is whether or not I'll be able to ditch Comcast. Has anybody here had good/bad experiences with Verizon's FIOS service?
I'm looking forward to the opportunity of voting with my dollar. Fuck you, Comcast.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
I thought the FCC has no say in what happens over cable networks. You can't complain to the FCC if there's inappropriate content on a cable channel, so why can you complain to them about the way Comcast runs their network?
Technology companies that simply pass traffic or host content for others enjoy broad immunity for _blindly_ managing content that belongs to someone else.
Those companies that start filtering this content, however, should lose this immunity and be subject to lawsuits from those who would like them to filter more or less than they already do. The potential liability would be enormous, and would put an end to filtering immediately.
Competition?
I'm not seeing any torrent problems. there was a blip when this all flared up for a few days seemed like I couldn't seed, but I'm able to seed and receive now. In fact, reception speed seems higher than ever. Would like to see if this is still happening or was an isolated regional issue, or what the heck? am I being given the rope to hang myself? What's going on?
I'm a Comca$t subscriber and I believe it was a few weeks after the AP story that I noticed my u/d ratio, of which the highest was probably 1.7, suddenly jumped a couple notches. My downloads were affected, but it was mainly the uploads which were throttled to being basically useless. I just hope the telecoms don't use a red herring of "but most of that traffic is illegal" to deter the FCC away from the core issue: Net Neutrality.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I'd like to introduce you to a person I think you will be fond "of".
Please meet Mr. "Unintended Consequences".
Comcast puts a 90GB per month cap on upload AND download combined in my area (even though they don't state it explicitly). At 8mbit you can download over 2TB a month. At 6mbit (which AT&T offers) you can download over 1.95TB a month.
When comparing the two, you have to look at 90GB/month upload/download with Comcast vs 1.95TB/month download with AT&T. For me AT&T has about 10% faster latency (I tested myself) and consistent latency (which really matters in online games and even typing in a remote terminal).
Yes AT&T has issues with data privacy but I haven't had any problems with caps or p2p blocking (both of which I had with Comcast before I switched).
to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber
*sigh* Well, I guess I can expect my cable fees to go up again. I wonder if this will be called a "Federal cost recovery fee" as a line item on my bill.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
okay so lets do a car analogy you pay $Station for "unlimited Gas" @ $2000 a month
and you are told single car only now what $station doesn't know is you drive a SUV
and you drive a lot so you are clicking what would be $90.00 bills almost daily so
instead of asking you to switch to a larger plan or tell you that you getting to much
they start dropping the octane on your gas to say 30 octane (from the 87 you are supposed to get)
or they always seem to have problems with the pump you are at.
For a Gas station these would be suicide (and in the octane case a felony) why is it okay for ISPs?
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Oh dear god no - I wish every ISP would block outbound port 25 connections from residential accounts. That would stop over half the spam I see at our servers. You can run a separate SMTP submission port (587 is the normal one, IIRC) on your servers to bypass that filtering - we're getting ready to do that after having problems with a new customer whose ISP does exactly that.
I also like having a business support number that I can call and bypass the Ricky Numbnuts "Have you restarted Internet Explorer?" 1st-tier tech support. Residential users have no need to set their reverse DNS, but businesses do, and it makes no sense whatsoever to place your technically literate customers who are willing to pay for better service in the idjit queue. Nor would the guys who can understand what business customers need have a great deal of fun phone-jockeying redneck after redneck through rebooting their cable modem.
Pay hoi polloi prices, get hoi polloi service.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
Say YES to Net Neutrality... then say NO to Telcom Immunity.
"Stay the Course" is NOT an option.
here in New Zealand, our main ISP/telco states in their t&c's that they will throttle p2p traffic.
it'll be interesting to watch the outcome to see what precedent will be set that we can exploit here.
I always thought that something like rapidshare or megashares would take off for distributing large content like demo games and linux ISOs, but the reality is that there are so many file sharing sites out there that the only way one will become a "standard" is if it is free, and currently all http file sharing sites require money.
back to the point, with my ISP stating the obvious in their t&c's and not hiding from the fact that they are for all intents and purposes censoring part of the internet -- while they still allow people to use p2p services, it's so slow as to be an exercise in redundancy.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
So homeland security MUST hate Comcast, they can't easily spy on file-sharing if everyone encrypts.
I would guess THAT must be the real pressure to end this.
That is a monstrously stupid analogy. Here's a better analogy.
You rent a small, compact car. You then decide to try and move cross-country with it. After you try this, you complain that the car was too slow and that you had to make several trips in order to carry everything.
Of course, a normal person would realize you should have rented a truck, and that your complaints stem from trying to use a service (small car) for a purpose it wasn't intended for.
Likewise, if you want to use business features (like accepting connections, VPN, or other business-class features), you should get a business plan. Complaining that the consumer version doesn't support the business features is just ludicrous.
The idea that Comcast should provide the features of a truck for the cost of a small car is ridiculous. If you need the features of a truck, you should expect to pay for them.
The idea that Comcast should provide the features of a truck for the cost of a small car is ridiculous. If you need the features of a truck, you should expect to pay for them.
Except in this case, Comcast advertised many of the features of a truck, but then had a limited supply of trucks which they had oversold, so started giving out compact cars to customers instead...
Again with the trucks Ted?
It's a change in contract if they're adding charges and if you cancel then they make $0 from their infrastructure and still have to pay the fine.
Awhile back a big brewhaha went down with my local cable company and they scheduled a hearing with the government oversight committee. A FCC type local commission that governed the cable company monopoly.
I tuned in 10 minutes late but watched the hearing. for 40 minutes I watched 5 cable company executives on the bench defend their actions against accusations from the committee.
What I messed in the first 10 minutes were the introductions. I was wrong. The accuations were coming from the consumers. The five on the bench were the commission. There are certain epiphanies in life that just stick.
I have zero faith this FCC "investigation" will result in anything but new laws that forbid the consumer from exposing proprietary company practices with stiff fines and jail sentances for bloggers, etc. who expose company secrets. Maybe a new law making packet sniffing illegal. They'll figure something out.
-[d]-
I'm paying slightly more and getting slower online speeds with DSL instead of cable, but it was worth it to stop funding these creeps.
BitTorrent is absolutely not anonymous at all. Anyone in the world can connect to the tracker and get a list of IP addresses which are currently in the swarm, and then connect to these IP addresses and ask for blocks of data to verify they are in fact serving up the material. It's used for copyright infringement solely because it's fast and easy
There's an issue not being addressed here. How would this affect all public networks and their ability to keep them viable for the rest of us who chose not to abuse resources (tragedy of the commons and all that)?
"People who distribute material in breach of copyright law should be punished to the full extent of the law (even if the law in question is at this point fairly insane), they are aware of the penalty's and still take the risk of doing it, but there is no good reason to ban a whole slew of technologies because they can be used to facilitate distribution."
Interesting how that "slew" of technologies has the built-in capability to hide not only one's identity but the location of the participants (both ends) as well as the identity of what's being transfered. Yup! Sounds like nothing more than a bunch of good old boys patching their latest game and downloading the latest Linux ISO.
"Peer-to-peer traffic is not client-server traffic"
Uh huh, forget the forum you're on, didn't you?
"No. If there are terms and conditions attached to a service those should be clear (that way a customer can make an informed choice), there is nothing wrong with an ISP preventing end users from running a given type of server or use the connection in a certain way, but it must be clear when the user signs up."
Next up the ISP comes over to your house and reads you the TOS which is posted on their website.
"commercial, and as to whether it is legitimate content being passed is not a concern of the ISP anyway (do they block spam, viral or malicious code, libellous comments?"
Oh no ISPS never block spam! *rolls eyes*
C'mon you nerds. Why are you still using BitTorrent?
I pay about £0.15 per gigabte for my downloads, to an American company, who is obviously making a profit because they've been in business for years.
A whole album costs £0.02 to download. It takes a minute or two. Always at the same speed. No uploading apart from, I guess, acknowledging packet receipts. It takes me longer to extract the RARs sometimes...
I'd tell you how, but you're all supposed to be nerds and the first rule of U***** is you're not allowed to talk about it. Sort yourselves out or give it up.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
OK, obviously you are right, it is *perceived* as being anonymous and is less easy to track than say a direct FTP server connection (both for the distributor and the recipient). Not to mention that users feel part of a crowd and unlikely to be targeted... not anonymous but less than completely onymous.
What competition?
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
anyone using BitTorrent is probably violating copyrights anyway and needs to have their access revoked, go to jail and pay a fine
so if you are thinking of using encryption to hide your copyright violations, guess what clones: you will have to use encryption that has an ADK or alternate decryption key registered with your isp
this so we can police your copyright violations. and as a extra kicker big brother will gain the ability to spy on all your communications because guess what: your isp won't forward encrypted messages that don't decrypt using the ADK
I have noticed something over the past couple of months, that I am having more and more trouble with torrents that are hosted on ThePirateBay's trackers. After doing a tracert, I noticed that AT&T is blocking all traffic out of the AT&T network directed to tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org and vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org I got around it by using Tor. Interestingly, they do not block the actual port or P2P traffic, just connections to thepiratebay trackers. Now while I know that most of the torrents on ThePirateBay are not legal in the US, their trackers are public, making it easy to setup a torrent, and they do have quite a few legal torrents. Even more interestingly, AT&T does not seem to block any other trackers that I know of. Hmmm
True, if it is their network they can do what they want. But let us not forget that our state and federal governments has all ready paid out $200,000,000,000 in subsidies to these companies so they could build out "their" networks to support broadband. In many cases, that money did not pay for what it was intended to pay for. If tax-payer money was given to the telcos for broadband build-outs, how much of the network is really theirs? This is just one example of the fleecing of Americans by the telcos. If we can't trust them to do right with our money (while enjoying record profits and revenues), how can we trust them to operate networks fairly, nuetrally and without discrimination?
Scientists now say the future will be far more futuristic than originally believed
Network access providers offer a service. If you don't like the service, don't pay for it. If enough consumers really want BitTorrent, the access providers will scramble to make money off of that desire.
If you really believe BitTorrent is that important to that many people, capitalize on that untapped market - create a business that caters to the starved masses. Of course, if you are wrong - that is, if there really are only a few, noisy, people who want this while everyone else is happy with what they have - then you will end up in the poor house.
And so it goes - when some people want things, they think they should simply be given it. Like a thumbsucking baby that only knows how to say "I want". What about the FCC? The FCC is only too happy to be the rattle that Baby bangs on businesses' heads.
I prefer that bandwidth hogging file-sharing be kept away from my shared pipe. My preference is to use an access provider that throttles out the "always on" bandwidth hogs, so I can get my Warcraft on without a lot of lag. However, if every Joe Shmoe BitTorrented my bandwidth down to zero, I wouldn't complain to the FCC, I would look for another alternative, and if none existed, I would make one.
Mine is Good
Has anyone ever thought about the fact that "fines" addressed to "x" company are just transferred back to the customer? (Increase fees, service charges, just_because line items) what would make the companies STOP and actually take notice: Fine the CEO/Stock Holders *DIRECTLY* certainly they can afford six figures to begin with. and would make screw-ups, stupid financial decisions, etc. would be a lot more costly and thus (hopefully) avoided.
here
The average since 1990 is that less than one third of their bribes go to Republicans.
That's not to say other industries don't donate to Republicans more in about the same ratio.
Kevin got his plum FCC assignment when he was airlifted to Florida to help Bush steal the election in 2000. He's a whore. He's just not the cable companies' whore. BusinessWeek explains that he "earned his spurs by being on the first flight to Florida from Austin the day after the contested 2000 election. As deputy general counsel to the Bush campaign, he oversaw the legal team working behind the scenes with the Dade and Broward County canvassing boards."
No doubt. Tack their asses to the wall!
Corp America and even the Government see the 'Net as the goose that lays golden eggs. It makes possible an information economy that the USA wants to own. But you can only cash so much out of a system before it ceases to be self sustaining.
The thing that defines the internet is its flexability. People can dream up new business models and attach it to THE INTERNET. Exert rigid control over the system and it will cease to be economically productive.
The Internet needs to be treated like a fishery. Some economic exploitation is to be expected. But the Government needs to step in to prevent big players from fucking it all up to make a quick buck. If Joe Blow finds that all the free stuff provided through flexible non-corporate-controlled channels (the reason Joe hits the web in the first place) has been replaced by pay-only stuff from the latest Corporate income generator then he might as well not even bother.
Comcast think people downloading free stuff are sponging off the businesses who invest money in the system. But they've got it backwards. Business attempting to make money from the system are sponging off of the interest generated by people providing free content.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Because in your gas station example it's *easy* to make a case. It's documentable (both through written records and video-recordings), repeatable, etc. You could walk into court and very easily prove that what these people are doing is out-and-out discrimination based on your usage.
Try doing so with Comcast. Their equipment affects one packet out of every thousand or so, just enough to sabotage a connection. Even if you knew what model of what product they're using (Sandvine such and such), how do you know what settings it's being run at? How do you show it's not just "A random computer glitch". Sure you could write software and do detailed statistical testing, but how are you going to explain your methodology to a judge? People think computers are magic voodoo boxes. And he's already going to take you much less seriously, since the consequences in your case aren't "getting stranded in Nowheresville, USA", but just "I can't download my Linux".
IMO what Comcast is doing is evil, and we all know they're doing it. But finding a good enough lawyer and making a good enough case against them is going to be *really* *hard*.
You know, I thought I was cynical. Even though my original post was tongue-in-cheek, you people depress me. I do not really have unrealistic expectations, but there is no justification for being quite so negative. Even if the money DOES go to the government, it is still a real "punitive damage" level of fine. And that is a big plus, for a change.
EVERYONE should have the ability to enjoy the internet. BitTorrent allows a couple dozen users to dominate bandwidth from a single node that serves hundreds of users. To combat these bandwidth hogs and allow others to enjoy the internet on the shared node the provider needs to shape traffic. As there are legit reasons to use BitTorrent and other P2P network applications I would like to see these applications throttled down rather than blocked. There must be a better way to control these road hogs.
A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities...
the obvious answer is Phone DSL vs. Cable vs. Sattelite/Cellular. those are the competitors for residential service.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Then let the market sort things out.
I mean if Comcast (or any ISP) thinks they should shape traffic let them tell their customers beforehand, and in non technical language, what services they are throttling. That could be anything, such as protocols, applications or types of content (such as bittorrent, all p2p, video, VOIP,uploads from user web sites, whatever). Also they should announce any changes in policy in advance and allow any customer to end their contracts early because of it. Of course the requiremenmt should go all the way to the backbone (so a small ISP can't say "I don't throttle-my metaprovider does"). For any violations they should fine their ass off (and let them pass the costs to anyone they like)
This allows:
1) Customers to choose providers, based on reality, not fiction
2) Expose any other dirty trick (say a Telco blocking VoIP to promote regular phone service)
Guess what happens then:
Fiber is cheap (to buy or lay new). Pretty soon Comcasts fiber will be going dark as other companies (established or new) make realistic offers that appeal to people. Or maybe Comcast will be a bit more reasonable and offer fair plans for all types of users. I don't really care which.