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Comcast Says FCC Powerless to Stop P2P Blocking
Nanoboy writes "Even if the FCC finds that Comcast has violated its Internet Policy Statement, it's utterly powerless to do anything about it, according to a recent filing by the cable giant. Comcast argues that Congress has not given the FCC the authority to act, that the Internet Policy Statement doesn't give it the right to deal with the issue, and that any FCC action would violate the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. '"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful," concludes Comcast VP David L. Cohen's thinly-veiled warning to the FCC, filed on March 11. "Bearing these facts in mind should obviate the need for the Commission to test its legal authority."'"
The Federal Communications Commission has made clear, Cohen writes, that cable service is not a common carrier and therefore is not subject to common carrier guidelines.
So that means they're responsible for what passes over their lines, right? Gonna be interesting.
Well, this loophole they seem to crow about (which is horse feathers to me, since the FCC has regulatory authority when it comes to denial of services by a communications provider... phone or otherwise...) is most likely trumped by the recently passed Internet Security Fun and Excitement Act (I forgot the name off the top of my head) that makes this fakery they're doing, impersonating _you_ (your machine, specifically) illegal and possibly a felony. As I understand it from the other discussions on this subject... Comcast's guilty of "hacking".... ;) For lack of a better term, legal-wise.
;) ...I know... wishful thinking...
So, no, the FCC may not have the power to stop Comcast (but I suspect they can levy a fine, but that's another discussion entirely), but I'd suspect the FBI does... and someone might do time for it.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
The FCC has no standing to police what comcast does or does not do to its customers because congress has not given the FCC that power.
Additionally, sometime during President Truman's last term, a statement was issued that essentially said 'We are not communists! See - we like the free market, and we will regulate as little as possible', which WAS approved by congress, and is currently active.
Comcast is essentially telling the FCC to not bother, as whatever finding they come to, Comcast will believe it illigit and not comply unless congress gets involved and changes the laws, or issues a new guidance.
Essentially - this is big political news, and if this goes forward we can expect to see a new set of good laws ( or bad) coming out of congress to address issues like this.
My bet? Be prepared for congress to give the go head to throttle down P2P as a public service.
That sounds like a challenge to me. I'll be interested to see if the FCC accepts the challenge and shows Comcast that it's the government, not corporations that run things, despite what many (including Comcast, obviously) may think.
SUCH ARROGANCE BY COMCAST!
In a different age and under a different president (Jimmy Carter), the FCC chairman could simply pick up his phone & ask his buddy in the white house to apply Antitrust Legislation to the Comcast monopoly..... thereby breaking apart the cable tv and internet arms into competing forces..... as was done with AT&T.
Who knows. Perhaps the next president will do exactly that.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Is an FCC victory in everyone's best interest, though? It's unlikely that Comcast will say "eh, so be it" and eat the cost of P2P bandwidth. My best guess is that they would then create tiered service levels -- the normal, p2p crippled service will be $50, the really, no-kidding-this-time unlimited account will be $120 (insert your own prices here, this is just for illustration). Will people be willing to pay double for unlimited, unfiltered bandwidth?
This is exactly why all communications lines must be seized as property of the public. We have public roads, public water, public electricity, and it's time we have public ownership of data lines.
I'm glad my city decided it wouldn't wait for Comcast or Verizon, and instead went and laid their own fiber network. Guess who has the best internet, phone and cable TV prices and service now?
You can't have your cake and eat it too, Comcast. Either you get a government-sanctioned monopoly OR you get to "let the market decide" whether you're doing things that hurt consumers.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
They've been forging packets. If the FCC can't do anything can the Federal Trade Commission step in? If I was Comcast I'd definitely prefer the FCC to the FTC.
I can see/hear it now...
"Comcast claims they have the fastest broadband speeds in the country. What good is that, when *THEY* decide what they will let you connect it to?"
"Want to grab the latest official game patch on BitTorrent? Sorry, Comcast is blocking it."
"There's a new Linux distro that just got released - but Comcast says you're not allowed to download it via P2P."
"What's next? No, you can't go to YouTube, but you can get the same content at comcastcrappyonlinevideos.com?"
"Try cutting the cable, and go with Qwest. You pay for the connection, and we'll get you connected - but YOU can decide what to connect to."
We can only dream.
If I were Comcast, I'd be a little more careful, because the government tends to not give a crap what you, as a business, think. And I'd bet there are plenty of other laws out there that they broke.
Besides, if they admit they broke their own rules, wouldn't that open them up to a class action lawsuit?
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
Now, is cable/internet service regulated by the state PUCs (i.e., is the service a "utility")? I don't know. But I urge people to sick their own State on unruly utility providers. It's fun and yet another way us lowly consumers can push back. If I witnessed Comcast pulling this shit with my account (I have DSL with some rural telco, so I can't even look for this), I'd at the least attempt to sick Utah's PUC on them.
Method of processing duck feet
I doubt that my local government (Lancaster PA) would allow me to set-up a second cable company. They've already made up their minds to only string ONE cable to the city homes, and therefore a new startup is blocked from entry.
It's a regulated monopoly.
And being a monopoly, Comcast can do whatever they want (like block access to Itunes) as long as Comcast keeps bribing the Lancaster politicians to keep quiet.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Is there any reason the virus's and worms can get through the P2P can't?
;)
Bit Torrent is already showing it's age.
I would like to get some team together to create on based on erasure codes, ECIP http://www.ecip.com/
or LT Code, the Luby Transform (Michael Luby), Fountain Codes (from Digital Fountain), network codes, Tornado codes, Online Codes, and Raptor codes.
In addition the P2P engine should morph and change it's communications similar to stealth viruses do.
So no static filtering scheme could work.
And it should also detect networks that attempt to block them and immediately launch a DOS attack against the router and infrastructure that attempts to block them. Let's not call is DOS attack, but basically by attempting to slow or stop P2P transfers to conserver bandwidth the system just starts to pour on the traffic even higher.
back in 1996 to 1999 Aryeh Friedman and myself worked on what we called Rude protocols, SPAC.
the basic idea was to provide a guaranteed data throughput on the receiver side without any regard to how much it had to send on the sending side.
This is critical for fix rate video transmission if you are to get good quality and is a very different approach to the QOS RSVP where your begging ISP's to allow your traffic to have a higher priority. We just Take it very rudely.
In 1997 we did a broadcast with Sir Arthur C. Clarke (who died yesterday) from Sri Lanka to the US.
It was over the Island of Sri lanka's only internet connection and 64K line that had 90% packet loss.
By pushing out almost 1 Mbps at the 64K like we were able to get a clean 60Kbps at the receive side for a live streaming video event! We had permission from the country's ISP at that time since the event lasted only for 1 hour.
http://www.livecamserver.com/ and http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/clarke.html
But during ours test in So Cal, we were on a Dual T3 Circuit that went into Mae West, Large data interchange, pushing 10Mbps video and the network had some small outage and we pummeled the entire California internet down to an almost complete outage, 1997. this only lasted for maybe 10 minutes or so as almost every network Backbone admin was scrambled to try to stem the 100Mbps flood of UDP packets that our protocol started to push down the line.
We took a lot of flack for that out, lost our Co-Lo at that location.
Anyhow since that time we just added some cap's on the maximum.
Point being, that any deliberate attempts to stem the flow would in a sense create back pressure, that would only force an increase of the data being sent, and so creating network blockages would have the opposite of the desired effect by costing them even more bandwidth instead of saving it.
Wouldn't that be a fun thing
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
If it really is unlimited, unfiltered bandwidth: yes.
Pirate Party UK
I, too live in Tacoma, WA. I can get a 1.5MB internet connection for $29.95 including taxes,etc. and I can walk into the LOCALLY OWNED ISP's office and talk to real techs. The city laid the cable and maintains it, and wholesales it to three ISPs who compete on pricing and supporting end users.
Scumcast and Qworst have been trying unsuccessfully to sink this venture, but so far our politicians haven't sold us out.
Personally I think Comcast should be broken up like the bells were. The more competition there is, the better our prices and customer service should be.
Enjoy the curb Comcast, because that's what I've kicked you to.
I'm a happy pessimist. I expect and prepare for the worst, when it doesn't happen I am pleasantly surprised.
Does this also mean I'm not allowed to "serve" my family photos to my website, or "serve" my latest DV video to youtube.com, or "serve" my webcam for chatting online every night with my friends (a major bandwidth hog)?
Hmmm.
I don't know the answer, but if it is "no" then it's a stupid policy. Also: Where's the justification for Comcast to block access to Itunes.com? That doesn't violate any terms of service, so why's it blocked for some Comcast customers?
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
This bribe is called a "franchise fee" it allows the local government to take a substantial kickback from a cable company to ensure they are the only game in town. The locality must drop the franchise fee if there are two companies in town so they generally want to keep that steady bribe coming in they make sure that competition can not come in without a larger bag of money.
Gotta love how local government find ways of doing what the Mob has done forever.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I agree. Internet access has become a utility and should be treated as such.
Ideally it has to go the Electricity or Water way - pay for as much as you use...
What idiots, Comcast are so desperate to save their own dumb asses from a federal investigation that they rely on a law passed in 1946! They didn't even have computers back then (besides the ones that take up a whole building and have as much memory as my cell phone), let alone the Internet!
When they passed that act, I'm sure they could have never guessed we would have the Internet, let alone guess that corporations would be sooo evil like they are now that they would use censorship and dirty politics to violate our civil liberties...
I'm not a civil engineer, but they all agree that what everyone wants to do ends up being the safest way to handle things.
http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
Speed limits exist to put profit into police and insurance companies, not to make anyone safer.
Care to give me a couple layman-worthy cites?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#85th_percentile_rule
http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
If your going to talk about things like the Autobaun, don't bother, since that isn't geared towards the Big Gulp and Taco, Cellphone, Hair Drying, and Novel Reading American Driver. We're too busy doing other things to be fully trusted to our own means. If there are valid studies, taking into account the unique American character of road use and vehicular philosophy, I will cede your point, barring that I'm sure (guessing here) that there are other studies, equally valid in method, that say otherwise.
Well, perhaps you should do society a favor, and turn in your license. Your argument is that the average American (which you are, and we can't assume otherwise) can't handle making reasonable judgement calls. It stands to reason that you can't either, so make us all safer and stop driving.
The only studies I'm aware of which contradict the civil engineers are done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Guess who fundes them? The same people can will raise rates if you get a ticket.. so they have a vested intrerest in making sure you get a ticket. Besides, the accident rates don't lie; rates do not increase as speed limits are increased, and in many cases accident rates actually drop.
We can agree on the mob-rule thing, though I wouldn't go so far as calling democracy (en toto) mob-rule, and thus bad, there is something to be said for a group of people having the right to represent themselves.
Of course there are issues that don't matter; for example, buying alcohol on Sunday, and other blue laws. These laws may be backed by a majority, but so what? Why should they take the rights of the minorirty that disagree?
I do find benefits in the idea of Philosopher Kings or meritocracy, but generally these go wrong, since those who claim the right to rule generally look out for themselves, to the detriment of the polis. We generally forget that government is here for the sake of the governed, and not for that of the governors.
Generally? Try "always." It's not that we "forget," it's that invariably once government starts regulating things, they tend not to stop. Our Consitution was supposed to stop or slow this, but unfortunately many state and certainly the Federal governments are overstepping their legal bounds. But that's ok, because the mob says its "for our safety."
Actually the ideal form of government, IMHO, would be mob-rule (ala democracy) with an informed public, and a large body of empowered experts within advisory roles in the government. Sadly, here in the US we have an ignorant and apathetic public, and corporate interests (and scientists who are willing sell their standards to said interests) represented in government. I digress.
Again though, the mob tramples the rights of the minority, so we must allow the minority to stop the mob from doing so. The only way to really stop all the issues you bring up is to simply remove most government intervention.
But, interestingly, the g-g-parent said something along the lines of "most people don't want speed limits, but they are enforced for revenue only". This IS a statement FOR mob-rule, the term "most people" confirms it.
I disagree with that statement; it seems to me that "most people don't want speed limits for themselves, but think that they should apply to everyone else." Also, I'm not arguing that we should remove speed limits because that's what people want; my argument is that speed limits are freedoms being limited illegally, not only because there's no proof that there is an "overwhelming societal need to do so (i.e. safety)," the opposite is true: speed limits make roads MORE unsafe. My argument has nothing to do with the OPs content