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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.
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?
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
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.