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.'"

Comments

BobB-nw

[alphadogg]

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

responsibility

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

Why Subscribe?

[jchawk]

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.

Exactly.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Exactly.

[Solandri]

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.

In this particular instance I agree with you. But in the general case, laws tend to be immutable in the short-term (and sometimes the long-term - just look at the Blue Laws still in many States' books), whereas self-regulation can quickly be overhauled if it becomes clear that something isn't working. On a more ideological level, laws are rules made by a committee (who often knows little about the industry), self-regulation is rules made by market forces. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The baffling thing to me about this whole thing is that Comcast could solve it really easily - just stop advertising "unlimited" bandwidth and publish the monthly transfer quotas. If they want they can even charge more for higher quotas. Then customers can make an informed decision how much they're willing to pay and self-police their own downloading. Instead for some bizarre reason Comcast (and most ISPs) seem to think the word "unlimited" is some holy marketing term which Shall Not Be Touched, and will go to enormous technically challenging and legally dubious methods to protect it.

Re:Finally!

[hey!]

Anything they propose will not be binding and will not have the force of law.

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.