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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.
IANAL, but...
Comcast: "The FCC can bite my shiny metal ass. Nyah, nyah, nyah!!!!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
Now, I sympathize with Comcast. Many ISPs, not just Comcast, are disrupting P2P sessions, and these sessions are in clear violation of most ISP's Terms of Service. And P2P is horribly disruptive, a single user can easily transmit 20 GB of data in a day.
Yet Comcast seems intent on making people WANT to regulate them. Its like they are deliberately behaving stupid?
They aren't agressive at pointing out all the other ISPs, to get the heat off.
They do stupid things like pack FCC hearing, say that the results won't matter, etc.
Who's running that place?
Test your net with Netalyzr
if comcast can convince the FCC not to bring it before a judge, they most certainly get to interpret the law however they would like.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Comcast: "Hey, FCC, I know that you're generally not wanting to regulate us cable companies, so why not just let us go?"
FCC: "Hmm, any chance of backing that up with a law somewhere?"
Comcast: "How about this one? Just say we're being regulated by 'market forces'."
FCC: "But you're a regulated monopoly! That'll never fly!"
Comcast: "Weren't you going to run for office? Here's a 'donation' to your 'exploratory committee'."
FCC: "Sounds good. The free market wins again!"
Isn't this the same Comcast which runs cable service in markets which usually has a local government-granted monopoly for cable service in those regions? Funny that now they want to say "let the market decide" when cable companies generally won't invest in the infrastructure unless granted a monopoly on providing cable service. I'm remembering back a long time - perhaps this isn't the case any more. If broadband options were available everywhere, I'd certainly say "let the market decide" - many people (myself included) only have one option for broadband, and it's often cable.
creation science book
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.
Yeah, right. Which is why US broadband penetration continues to rank lower and lower worldwide despite $200 Billion from the government. And people are protesting traffic filtering. And your company is so afraid of actual people sitting at an FCC public hearing that they pay people to hold seats for employees, busing the employees in, and locking the public out from the meeting.
What Comcast is doing with the sandvine filtering is forging packets. That's fraud.
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.
Hah. My favorite version of that line.
[someone slips and falls]
me: Is there a lawyer in the house?
lawyer: [stands up, raises hand] Here, good sir!
me: *BANG!*
lawyer: Gah! [drops dead]
me: Now do we have anyone from marketing?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"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," - Cohen
I agree completely and will move my "customer experience" from Comcast to Verizon FioS ASAP.
Correct me if I'm wrong but could this work? 1)Start new ISP that does not filter 2)Get help from the FCC because they are a bit pissed at Comcast for their "nah nah nah You cant get us!" crap 3)When Comcast tries to buy you out/stomp you in to oblivion use antitrust laws to stay alive. 4)Grow to a reasonable size because you have some idea of how the internet works and will not be a dick to your customers. 5)???? 6)profit
They gave up their rights to rely on the marketplace when they signed on to government-endorsed monopoly status.
I would have absolutely NO qualms about allowing the marketplace to sort this out - unfortunately, the marketplace is artificially sparse.
If a power company with government-mandated monopoly was blocking power to your electric oven because it sucked down too much juice and you ran it all the time, the government would get involved.
If an internet company with government-mandated monopoly blocks bits to a piece of software because it uses too much bandwidth, the regluatory body (FCC) should get involved.
That's how it should work. If you want the government to keep you in power, you gotta make sure your services don't fuck people over. If you don't like it, have fun competing and - well - making consumers happy by striving to have the best and least expensive service. Common fucking sense. Unfortunately there's nothing common about it..
(For those of you who don't think this is an enforced monopoly - Right now I only have one choice for broadband - optimum. Time warner services buildings two blocks from me, but I'm in a different district in brooklyn and TW is legally restricted from servicing the area -- because it's optimum's area.)
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And the people to bitch to about that would be your state and/or local politicians, because that's who granted the monopolies in the first place. I've never heard of a Federal cable franchise agreement......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
If I were comcast, I would just completely block P2P uploading as it violates the TOS. Not a popular answer I know, but my terms do say that I cannot run a server on my residential connection. P2P seeding should qualify as a file server. Comcast made the mistake of letting customers do something that was against the TOS for far too long. Not that there is a time limit on enforcing TOS, but it is always harder to give someone something and then take it away than it is to not give them something to begin with.
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
someone might do time for it
Dream on. In America a rich powerful man only goes to prison if a richer, more powerful man wants him there. The rule of law is worthless when legislators are bought and sold like cattle.
For instance, how many Sony executives went to prison for the XCP rootkit? That's right, none. Nobody from Comcast will serve time either, and if they donated enough money to the campaigns of the "elected" officials and legislators they'll continue to be able to abuse their customers.
And now for something completely different:
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Actually, our country has the largest highway system in the world (by far) and it is widely regarded as a modern marvel of engineering. "There's already pointless speed limits when everyone wants to go much faster" is the stupidest argument I have ever heard and potholes happen - the fact that the US government successfully manages a transcontinental system of 45,400 km in length through some of the most varied terrain in the world speaks to its efficacy. If you want to argue about government monopolies, you should probably pick something less successful.
Actually, it's only a server (in the classical sense) if it accepts incoming connections and most P2P apps (Bittorrent included) will function just fine without this ability, albeit with a reduced number of peers that it can reach.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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