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Comcast Proposes Self Regulation and P2P Bill of Rights
Torodung writes "In a recent move, Comcast has proposed a 'P2P Bill of Rights,' joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior. They have instead proposed comprehensive industry self-regulation and cooperation with major P2P software vendors as a lesser evil: 'Comcast is looking to further position itself as proactively — and responsibly — addressing the issue of managing peer-to-peer traffic that traverses its network, announcing Tuesday it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and Internet service providers.'"
Now why would anyone be concerned about ISPs meddling with their traffic? University of Washington researchers are set to release a paper today that says one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed along the way... http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041608-isps-meddled-with-their-customers.html
BitTorrent was originally designed to be VERY tolerant of ISP's needs. Prior to the obfuscated protocol expansion, the first thing sent by each connection, on both sides, was "BitTorrent protocol", easy for a protocol analyzer to discover and assign a lower bandwidth tier.
So what did ISPs do? They throttled it to zero, rather than to an intermediate level we all could live with.
The end result: Encrypted BitTorrent, and ISPs using drastic methods like spoofing reset packets.
I'd been following this Comcast P2P news in the past, but I hadn't really noticed any issues with torrents over my Comcast connection. So, naturally, I didn't think much of it since things were working fine. But in the past week when I try to download any torrent, web browsing is slowed to the point of being useless -- and that's _with_ upload speeds throttled to 3kbps. I know something changed on their end, because everything has remained identical on mine -- I don't even own the stupid Comcast-issued modem.
Normally I'm really patient about all this sort of stuff, but I'm paying $59.95 per month on a student budget for shit internet. Fuck this and fuck Comcast. If only I could set up something with a place like Speakeasy and resell to my neighbors... but I can't afford the sysadmin time cost, nor do I feel as comfortable now that Best Buy owns Speakeasy.
I'll ask the obvious question here... Why subscribe to these providers that limit or restrict your traffic?
You may respond that, they are your only choice. Well unless you choose to go without or you choose to help lobby for better legislation then you're stuck.
Also are you willing to pay more for your internet? I choose to go with a DSL provider who is 1/3 the speed of Comcast and I pay a little more every month to be with them. Why? They don't limit my traffic and they let me have a static IP. To me it's worth it.
Just my two cents. I see a lot of people complaining but most don't want to do more then just that. Vote with your dollar! Donate to lobbies that are fighting for your cause. Otherwise stop complaining.
Anyone care to explain to me why a completely informal, unenforced "Bill of Rights", between Comcast and whatever commercial entities exist in P2P, is any better for consumers than government intervention?
Or answer this: If Comcast really is willing to cooperate, why are they so terrified of government regulation? Why is a legally mandated "Bill of Rights" worse for them than what they are proposing?
The obvious answer is, if it was a law, they couldn't simply violate it.
Next question: Why is Comcast working with BitTorrent, the company? Why do they need to "work with" any P2P corporations, rather than simply dropping their packet shapers and letting P2P protocols work well? Smells to me like Microsoft cutting a deal with Novell -- Microsoft obviously can't cut a deal with Linux itself, as it's a completely distributed, fault-tolerant community, so there's no one CEO to buy -- so they make a deal with Novell, while leaving everyone else out in the cold. Smells to me like Comcast is trying to do the same with P2P -- they can't make a deal with every single filesharer, everywhere, and they won't accept simply falling back to net neutrality, which is what we really want -- so they make a deal with some company which does filesharing, leaving everyone else out in the cold.
Gotta love the smell of bullshit in the morning.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
(I'm a bit rusty on the details, but I've been advised at various times by lawyers that there are situations where a company can be held via contract law to statements made outside the contract itself, if they basically define the relationship between the company and the customer. I doubt Comcast's lawyers are stupid enough to walk into this trap unknowingly, but you never know.)
Although I very much doubt that Comcast is acting in anything approaching good faith here, it's not impossible for them to make the Bill of Rights binding, if they were sufficiently motivated.
What needs to happen is that we, as users, need to make sure that Congress and various state legislatures aren't distracted by any sort of non-binding agreement on Comcast's part. If they want to avoid burdensome regulation, they can come up with a 'Bill of Rights' and then hold themselves to it contractually. But if they don't do that, or if they put it in their contract but then leave in a way of unilaterally amending the contract, it's not worth two squirts of piss.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well,never forget that under the law, two plus two can equal five, for sufficiently large values of two or sufficiently small values of five.
Suppose you are an ISP that advertises its adherence to the P2P Bill of Rights. You entice customers to sign up under a TOS that includes the standard statement saying you can change TOS at any time. Then you decide to take away some of the rights listed in the P2P Bill of Rights, pointing to your TOS statement as proof you are entitled.
I'm not sure that works. A "right" after all is just the flip side of a duty. A right held by an individual consists of a set of duties borne by certain others with respect to him. You can't just unilaterally declare one of your duties towards somebody void. You can't change the TOS in a way that absolves you of the duty of providing service, but does not absolve the customer of the duty of paying you. That's unconscionable.
So, you'd have to say in your TOS that you have the right to declare the specific rights in the Bill of Rights to be void. Or you'd have to say in the Bill of Right that "rights" doesn't mean something the service providers are obligated to abide by. Otherwise, you've just enticed customers to sign on with you by deception.
I am not a lawyer, but surely this is at least one of those things lawyers are always telling you not to do, because even if you are certain to win if it ever comes to court you could not possibly hope to gain enough benefit to pay for the costs of fighting and winning.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"It's rather like raising children. Constantly exploring and pushing their limits and no matter how often you cite the rules to them, they will break the rules and require punishment. When a child exclaims, "I don't need punishment I'll be good!" I doubt anyone actually believes that child. So why should we believe Comcast?"
This brought to mind my experiences raising my 4 year old. He's constantly trying to push the limits and as a result is constantly getting into trouble. Mostly simple stuff like turning on the TV right after Mommy and Daddy told him not to or using potty talk when we warned him about it already. (Much of the bad behavior we attribute to him copying a very bad influence in school, but that's a different issue.) His main punishment is being put in his bed in his room. He has to sit there for at least 4 minutes (perhaps longer depending on the offense and on how loudly he complains).
Invariably, when he's told that he's going to his room, he insists that he'll be good now. Of course, we don't believe him and even if we did it doesn't change the punishment. The time for being good is *before* you do something bad, not *after* it.
You're right to compare this action to the actions of companies. Companies try to get away with whatever they can. They'll often behave nicely when someone (press, government, public) is looking, but will "misbehave" as soon as backs are turned to them. They do it with a subtly that my son has yet to learn, of course. If my son tells me "Don't look at me now" it's a sure sign he's about to misbehave. Companies rarely say "don't look at how I'm running this operation" when they're doing something illegal. Of course, they'll often say "government interference/regulation isn't needed, we can self-regulate" so perhaps that is the corporate equivalent to "Daddy, look away from me now."
I'm not a fan of too much government regulation, but with large corporations there is definitely a need for it. Otherwise the corporations will run roughshod over the rights of the people for the sake of a slightly larger profit.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Self regulation is crap.
If comcast thinks they need to self-regulate, then what harm is there in making it as law?
After all as Bush often claims, why do you worry about surveillance, if you are not breaking the law?
I suggest FCC adopt comcast's sell-regulation, make it as a felony to break it and say to comcast: "If you break this, your CEO and the board would goto jail on charges of perjury and child endargement."
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative
Some of those things, like roads are not widely available as a private sector business. So let's look at retirement, Social Security costs 15.3% of every paycheck. From everything I've seen, it won't actually be there for me to live off of when I reach retirement age. However, if I save only $500 a month at 4% interest for my 40 year career life span, at 65 I will have $590,980.66. Granted that's not huge, but it's a nice bit better than the nothing I will be getting from Social Security. And that's only if I save $500 a month, if I could save $1250 a month (15% of a $100,000 a year job) then my retirement fund would be $1,477,451.67. Which in a 4% yield savings account would give me $59,098.04 a year to live on in my retirement. So retirement, as managed my the US government sucks worse than a lemonparty link.
Now let's look at schools, I think the Washington Post has already explained this one nicely. There is a Snopes discussion of this very topic, but the main point made there is that private schools are selective, they send back the troublemakers and under performers, but that is not true of all private schools. I would like to point out that the second boarding school I linked to costs less for one year room, board, and education than what DC spends per student on education only.
We are all just people.
Yes, and people went to jail for it. I think what should be altered in such situations in this removal of the legal personhood of the company so that the shareholders get fines and jail terms relative to the amount of stock they own. I think the markets would work a lot more responsible if those investing in companies, even if its hundreds of thousands of them, were directly responsible in proportion to their ownership for the misdeeds of the companies they invest in. It would make shareholders a helluva lot more critical of the people they put in power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm tempted to resort to sarcasm here, because what you said is so stupid. However, I won't, because if you're that stupid, you will think that my sarcasm is agreeing with you. Instead, I'll point out that it's the greed of competing entities that forces them to be honest or lose your business. Who competes with the federal government? Other country's governments? The transaction cost of switching is a little high. That's why governments are incompetent -- because they're greedy and have nobody to keep them honest. If Verizon pisses me off, my transaction cost for switching is $175.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist