ISPs Say P4P Negates Need for Net Neutrality Regs

Donut hole hole writes "AT&T and Comcast are using recent successful P2P trials to argue to the FCC that there's no need for strong traffic management or net neutrality rules. 'Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent. This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."' Looks like Comcast only likes P2P technology when it can be used to serve its political and regulatory agenda."

Comments

p4p means

[WarJolt]

Don't be fooled. When comcast says p4p they mean Pay 4 Performance. You think they're doing this out of the kindness of their hearts? If they could charge you for this they would.

Re:p4p means

[ajs]

Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."

It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.

Not the worst idea ever, just a contender.

Re:p4p means

[Eighty7]

Nah in theory it checks out. Keeping traffic within your network will help costs. Give azureus some network topology information & you won't need to throttle as much. In theory. Carriers have everything to gain from this.

The million dollar question is whether they mean all P2P traffic, or just *AA approved content. They're making a new protocol & it's their data so the ball's in their court. I can easily see them using this as an excuse to go after P2P even more.

Re:p4p means

[doas777]

You're right the purported goal of P4P is to inject logic that will attempt to find local (or close) users for a peering protocol, and that sounds like a good idea, right? I agree. if only i could trust the people doing it.
P4P is a major privacy killer. based on what I see at the P4P workgroup page, P4P is not a protocol or code that will be inject into existing P2P apps, it is a network management technique and toolkit that the ISPs can use to control existing and future P2P traffic, presumably without knowledge or consent from any of the peers. In fact here is one of the project objectives:

Determine, validate, and encourage the adoption of methods for ISPs and P2P software distributors to work together to enable and support consumer service improvements as P2P adoption and resultant traffic evolves while protecting the intellectual property (IP) of participating entities Somehow I just knew IP rights would come up. I'll pay more attention when the pirate bay is in the core group. Until then, I'm not interested, logical as the idea may seem.

Re:p4p means

[poetmatt]

Of course, by your logic what could possibly go wrong until we see how horrid it is, right?

Not to mention the privacy implications, the lack of an opt-out, or the fact that this doesn't work if things aren't hosted in your area, right?

You have to know quite a bit to magically route things local.

Given comcast's track record, why would you ever assume they turned over a new leaf? That's like thinking that Microsoft has a real open-source offering because they made a new announcement to be more open-source friendly. Yet how many years have we heard stuff like that, again?

Re:p4p means

[mrsteveman1]

Their original goal has always been to stop P2P entirely, since they equate P2P with piracy as far as the content industry is concerned, which Comcast et al are a part of.

If anything this is a way to placate the FCC and congress, while appearing to embrace P2P, but only as a distribution method for their own content.

Really?

[TubeSteak]

Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

That ISPs have found some technological work around does nothing to change the fact that they'd rather screw around with the network than build more infrastructure.

Fundamentally, either Net Neutrality is a good idea or it isn't.
The specific circumstances are only tangently relevant.

Can the Gov't regulate?

[g-san]

Can an industry that redefines itself every 18 months be regulated by a government organization that takes 60+ months to pass legislation regulating said industry?

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[doas777]

Interesting. I'm somewhat torn on this one.

I really don't trust utilities providers. I've seen enough to know that my state's utility regulatory commission does a good job balancing the needs of the providers with the needs of the public.

I really don't want regulation of the internet, but when I think about it, it's the content of the internet that I want unregulated, not the means by which corporate titans mangle my clickstream.

In the long run, I see NN as the only way to keep the telco's and the mafiaa from destroying the internet I love, and sucking money out of my pocket in the process.

In other news...

[rastoboy29]

Since we didn't have a hurricane last week, obviously Global Warming is not a problem.

NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[EdIII]

P2P, P4P, A2M, blah blah blah FUCKING blah.

This has nothing to do with any file sharing technology. Nothing. They want the government, and those BASTARD consumers, to believe that "marketplace forces, rather than government regulation" prevailed and solved the problem.

Well the REAL problem was ISP's selling unlimited bandwidth contracts. Right there is the heart of the issue, one they don't want to talk about. They advertise impressive speeds (throughput) and unlimited "internet" which is basically no limitation on the amount of data you could transfer in a given month.

If that is true, which legally they should be held to AT LEAST the unlimited transfers, then P2P is irrelevant isn't it? Sure it has its problems, but none of that is the consumer's fault. They are using their "unlimited" connections in a "unlimited" way.

So now they cannot deliver on those "impressive" speeds since they were overselling their real capacity in the first place.

To put it another way.... It would be like an Airline company saying you could fly as far as you want up to 3 times a month for $99 dollars a month. They screw up getting greedy and all of the sudden they can't actually deliver 3 times a month since all the flights are constantly full.

No, don't buy this fairy tale from Comcast. The consumers are all entitled, BY CONTRACT no less, to do what they are doing.

If P4P ends up vastly increasing the efficiency of the consumer communications going across their network, then that is GREAT for anyone that owns a part of Comcast. More profit margin returning.

It DOES not mean it should be an end to Net Neutrality or government regulation of their sneaky little asses....

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[nlawalker]

No kidding. I feel like this scenario of the ISP's backing themselves into a corner with "unlimited" contracts is similar to the sub-prime debt crises that put the United States in the middle of a debt whirlwind. They throw these contracts/loans out there thinking "we can capitalize on this resource (homes/internet) that everyone thinks they basically have a right to nowadays by providing favorable looking terms to even the lowest schmuck."

The difference, though, is that the mortgage creditors got in over their head in bad loans because of people that didn't know what they were doing (jumping into an ARM that they wouldn't be able to handle later). The ISPs got in over their head by people that *knew* what they were doing (internet users making the most of their unlimited connections). Now that more and more people can do the same thing with easily accessible tools, the ISPs are up shit creek.

Are They Regulated or Not?

[hardburn]

Just make up your mind about being regulated or not. If you want to take tax payer money, then you're going to be regulated. If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money.

Minor correction

[geekoid]

"Just make up your mind about being regulated or not. If you want to take tax payer money, then you're going to be regulated. If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money."

and anything you built with taxpayer money is open to all.

Seconded

[Jane Q. Public]

That is what this is about, and I have been saddened by the fact that even those in on the consumer side have been reluctant to talk about it.

Cable subscribers, forget what it says in the small print. You signed a contract that said "unlimited" in BOLD print. So it should have been unlimited. And if they did not have the money, as they claimed -- even after charging those outrageous rates -- to make them unlimited, they should have stopped advertising the accounts as "unlimited"!!!

This is not genius-level material. They defrauded consumers. Without regulation, they will continue to do the same.

I remember this from long ago.

[symbolset]

Satellite phones. When you made a call it was always long distance and always billed both ways. At hideous rates.

Hey, whatever happened to the ubiquitous satellite phone anyway? That didn't seem to come about. It's like they all died out from competition or something.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[slashtivus]

Most routers do not run windows. They would have to break the internet to stop any TCP/IP compliant device to stop working. I use Kubuntu from time to time and it works fine. They don't officially support it since it is a small market share of tech-savvy people, so that is somewhat understandable. That said I helped my neighbor lady out yesterday and Comcast support had done more to wreck her connection than help (1/2 hour on the phone for her). I had her back up in running in about 5 minutes of fixing all their mistakes. Count yourself lucky that they do not "support" you.