What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing

The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."

Comments

Ars brings the Audio

[Dr. Eggman]

Ars Technica's article included MP3 Audio clippings of the hearing.

Comcast sucks

[Izabael_DaJinn]

Andy Oram links to his older article (which he says is still relevant) where he blames the current situation on other things as well:

1 ) Bell telephone companies.

2) Congress

3) dot-com commerce sites.

4) Internet2

5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."

I don't know. I myself can see all those as part of the big problem, of course, but I'd rather just point my finger at guys like this:

Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen: "I don't think we're restraining the customers from using the service in accordance with the way we're selling [sticking] it to them."

Re:Comcast sucks

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I'm not sure who Andy Oram is other than a blogger for Oreily, but his blaming of the dot com ecoms and the internet 2 are incredibly lame. He might as well have blamed Atilla the Hun, for all the relevance.

Re:Comcast sucks

[steelfood]

5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."

As long as the majority of the American public has access to Youtube and Myspace (and now Facebook), they're largely happy campers, apathetic to every other aspect of the internet, especially the technical ones or the ones that require any amount of thought. It's just like television; as long as there's American Idol and Lost, everybody's happy. Nobody cares about matters of substance like what's being reported on the major news outlets.

Re:Comcast sucks

[Stanislav_J]

Nobody cares about matters of substance like what's being reported on the major news outlets.

They report on matters of substance on the news channels? When did this start?

Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

[bconway]

Network Neutrality refers to ISPs double dipping on charging/extorting fees for both users paying for their connections and web sites paying for prioritization of traffic according to origination and destination. It does not refer to protocol-based QoS. It does not mean a flat, unmanaged, unQoS-ed Internet. By repeatedly and deliberately misusing this phrase, its importance is being weakened.

Re:Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

[Tuki]

Also stop misusing "Network Management"! What they are dong is traffic shaping, which I would say is a Network Engineering function, not that of Network Management.

Re:Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

[corsec67]

No, what they are doing is Traffic Forgery. They were forging packets to get the connections to stop. Forgery is something we shouldn't tolerate in any form, especially when it is from the ISP who is perfectly placed to do a Man-in-the-middle attack on traffic.

They weren't doing any kind of classic traffic shaping, since that takes much more processing power to do.

Juliet Sierra

[Taelron]

Thats the FCC will do, Jack ... The majority of their hearings either come up unresolved or contrary to the public good. Business intrests win out more often then Joe citizen under the current administration... Though unlikely to change much even after administrations change... Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.

Re:it's simple

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

...or option 3, they can charge based off of usage (hopefully with a peek/off-peek difference for pricing)

...or option 4, they can reinvest their massive profits into bulking up their infrastructure so they don't have to worry about volume.

Re:Comcast in hot hot heat

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

Basically.

Look, Comcast is just being pissy because they dont want to put in new lines. End of story. In my area (as with MANY others) cable companies are bought out all the time. Comcast bought Adelphia, who had bought GE Communications probably 5 years before that. Comcast KNOWS that if it puts the money into upgrading its capacity, it will bankrupt, and some new, fancy cable company will come in, but its newly installed lines for pennies on the dollar, and take over. Problem solved for 5 years.

I don't care for Verizon personally, but they're doing the right stuff with this FiOS. They're laying down fresh fiber to eventually replace their old copper lines. The interwebz aren't getting any smaller, so this is the way all ISPs will have to go sooner or later (without some miracle in wireless tech).

Furthermore, I am paying for an unlimited service. Thats what its called and advertised as, unlimited. Well, fucking with my speeds and sending fake reset packets, well, that seems like a limit to me, doesn't it?

I envy you people that CAN bitch about other sucky ISPs, because Comcast is the only one I'll ever be able to bitch about here.

Poll

[DavidD_CA]

I'm curious what the /. community thinks... what if a company such as Comcast were to offer two plans:

1. $30/mo - The internet as we know it today without any preference to content providers, advertising, etc
   
2. 2) $15/mo - An internet where some content providers get preference, subsidizing the lower monthly bill.
   
3. 
   If companies offered a choice would we still care?
   
   Or are we worried that all providers will go the way of #2 and the price of #1 will inflate as supply dwindles?

Re:Comcast in hot hot heat

[calebt3]

Have you checked if Speakeasy DSL is available in your area? Their Terms of Service seem somewhat sane:

If you utilize any of your Speakeasy services in a manner which consumes excessive bandwidth or affects Speakeasy's core equipment, overall network performance, or other users' services, Speakeasy may require that you cease or alter these activities. So there is the possibility that they will ask you to throttle your own speed during the day or something. Not likely, I know, but another paragraph gives some hope:

Speakeasy believes in the right of the individual to publish information they feel is important to the world via the Internet. Unlike many ISP's, Speakeasy allows customers to run servers (web, mail, etc.) over their Internet connections, use hubs, and share networks in multiple locations. Any service that causes a disruption in the network integrity of Speakeasy or its vendors, whether directly or indirectly, is strictly prohibited and could result in termination of service. This may include but is not limited to: IRC servers, adult-content servers, bots, webpages hosted on any Speakeasy servers, servers connected to a Speakeasy provided Internet connection, or shared networks. Speakeasy reserves the right to modify or terminate services at our sole discretion. There is one other restriction:

Speakeasy respects the intellectual property rights granted under the US copyright laws and the interests of subscribers and content providers on the Internet. You may not store material on, or transmit material over, Speakeasy, Inc.'s information systems or servers in any manner that infringes the intellectual property rights of any entity or individual. All notices received by Speakeasy indicating any activity suspected to infringe upon third party intellectual property rights will be re-routed to the primary account holder on file, accompanied by a request to verify and possibly cease and desist. Speakeasy Inc.'s policy of service suspension or termination of members deemed to infringing the intellectual property rights of a third party is in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") as well as US copyright law. So no seeding illegal content. But legal content (Vuze, for example) would seem to be acceptable.

Re:I disagree

[kiddailey]

Please.

Yes, Bush has been a disappointment, but you're kidding yourself if you think his exit will have any measurable effect on policy.

I can think of a few hundred other people (congress and even the people that continue to vote these shills into office) to blame for lack of positive change along with the president, and they're not all related to the administration. In fact, last I looked, the Democrats controlled congress. If they really wanted to, change could have been long since happening.

As long as the money stays in Washington and we have career politicians, things will remain the same.

Re:I don't need notches in my gun

[ILuvRamen]

I was gonna mention that too. It doesn't make sense. You fire guns and put notches in belts, right? I've never heard of a notch in a gun. Anyway, nothing's going to come out of this except maybe the FCC banning Comcast employees from using steroids.

A "Network Neutrality" issue -IS- what this is.

[funchords]

Prof. Timothy Wu, the man who DID first coin the term "Network Neutrality" testified at the hearing, and he seemed perfectly satisfied that discriminating against users' BitTorrent uploads is a fine example of a Network Neutrality violation.

In your example, the incentive is MONEY gained by charging content providers extra fees for carriage and then giving their traffic preferential treatment.

However, in the Comcast example, the incentive is MONEY saved by eliminating BitTorrent traffic and then putting off the new plant installations installations and additional transit fees that would normally have been paid to handle user demand.

So what's the real difference?

And nobody wants an unmanaged un-Qos'ed internet. But most people think that how the Internet works is the job of the IETF and the Internet Standards ... who already have defined ways for applications to identify time-critical, jitter-sensitive packets and have defined what carriers should do about them.

Otherwise, how do you write software for an world-wide internet when half-a-dozen ISPs and transit providers on any given path want to "tune" the higher-level protocols to their own secret views on how the Internet ought to be prioritized?