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

[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?

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.

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.