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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.'"
Finally!
Wolves propose sheep "Bill of Rights".
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
Yeah, right. The ISPs have gotten so far into bed with the RIAA that the only thing listed in the "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the right to remain silent.
Comcast is beginning to feel the pressure, they are stalling for time now with faux "rights bills". Now is the time to push EVEN HARDER for full Net Neutrality legislation. We have them on the ropes, don't let up now!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Not surprising that missing from their list of "industry experts" are groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.
Wow. It took it almost 10 years for major corporations to see how P2P can be used effectively for a lot of things other than just 'sharing illegal mp3s'.
Capitalism is good, but not when lead by blind corps with no consumer interest in mind.
And here's the catch:
cooperation with major P2P software vendorsWhich still means that if the P2P "software vendors" (who are these?) pays them, they'll allow it. Great neutrality.
c++;
They suggest SELF-regulation...
I wonder how long this regulation will actually last before it goes back to the status quo.
or, how about instead they just provide the service people are, um, you know paying for?
Just move my packets around without f'ing with them, please and thank you.
"joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior"
I loved ridiculously ignorant statements like this. How did it become a monopoly in the first place? What stops another company from springing up to provide cable internet services for cheaper? Answer - government intervention. Saying that government regulation is somehow going to fix what government regulation broke is absurd. If you want to get rid of a monopoly, get rid of the government regulation that prevents competing companies from existing. Creating the illusion of choice through increased regulation is not going to be good for consumers. They're going to continue getting inflated prices and idiotic restrictions like what was attempted for torrents.
I didn't actually RTFA but I quickly skimmed it, as I save my reading for writers who don't put me to sleep, except when I read in bed. Where in the article does it say what rights P2P users should have?
My guess is "you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Reminds me of a poorly translated sign I saw on a third-world trade shop picture: "We won't cheat you too bad."
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.
this might even work in today's anti-regulatory environment.
y'know, if the us govn't was willing to subsidize infrastructure ... then you might not have these problems. ... to avoid all those american mods who mod down for 'anti-american sentiments' rather than modding up for 'common sense'. The two seem to be mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I posted AC
And this is there way of co-opting use profiles very handily into their plans. Instead, it's time for them to invest capex and opex into new and improved facility for Comcast shareholders and most importantly users -- to keep up with demand.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This is what happens when you let an ISP service also become a very large and controling media outlet.
Comcast wants to make money off of the ISP service, their media services and any access to media (mostly make money off of others media) in one way or another.
I can see how they would want to make money off the ISP side and the media side, but when they want to control media though control of their ISP business they are crossing a line which I'm sure they will be fully allowed to.
If they are allowed to start controling p2p service like they will be allowed to control how not only how people access the internet though their network but what they access it will be yet another step towards them controling nearly every aspect of what you see when you use them as an ISP provider.
TruePunk | Games
Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?
Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?
When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.
Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.
Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.
This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.
Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
Don't think it's just P2P that Comcast is trying to control. I've noticed that when I attempt large downloads from Apple (regardless of material, I've seen it on both iTunes movies and the iPhone SDK), they just craaawl along. (~200 kbps).
When I switch to the VPN at my company, the speeds suddenly shoot up to around 7-8 Mbps, even with the encryption/tunnel overhead, and still traveling over Comcast's network. Can't just be coincidence, eh?
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.
Must have taken a page from the G W Bush playbook by naming something the opposite of what it is. Patriot Act, No child Left Behind, Clean Air Act, now P2P Bill of Rights.
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!
Self regulation beats government regulation, by and large. It can avoid bureaucracy and calm fear in the market.
On the otherhand, Comcast has been doing underhanded things with their traffic. Do you really trust them to adhere to any self-regulation proposal?
On the third hand (if you're Zaphod), this might be a good opportunity for concerned internet users to air exactly how they think an ISP should treat their traffic. Maybe the technocrats at the IEEE can get involved too.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I just want the unlimited package that I was promised by my ISP when I signed up! Quit giving us this when we pay for that!
Could the summary have possibly been written any more biased?
Its weird how (the majority of) slashdot is entirely anti regulation when it comes to personal regulation by the government.
Its even more weird how (the majority of) slashdot happens to be pro regulation when it comes to protecting your 'right' to steal.
Go figure.
If the people(most of whom are just trying to provide an excuse for comitting a crime...) who claim that the music/movie/isp industry 'needs to change' legitimately wanted to see change, they wouldnt be downloading any illegal movies/music at all. They would be downloading and donating towards independant music/movies exclusively.
People dont like how the riaa calls downloads a 'lost sale'. Well, if you're a salesman, and you have someone interested in your product but who decides not to buy it, that is a lost sale. The fact that you downloaded proves your interest in said item. As long as people are interested in the current product, change will be shunned.
But, the FACT is that the majority of people do not actually want any change in the industry, the only REAL reason 90% of the people crying about p2p filtering/net neutrality care about it is to allow themselves to STEAL
Man, I have been very disappointed with the switch from INsight to COmcast in Illinois. Even though they are using the same hardware locally, upload speeds (and download to some extent) have been severely reduced---over an order of magnitude. I don't run a server, but I sync my home and work computer with rsync scripts nightly, and it takes forever now. I am guessing they are doing a LOT more filtering and traffic carving which has screwed with throughput.
As soon as the hubbub blows over, they'll start modifying their "regulations" to suit themselves. Some sort of government regulation is needed... at least if Congress or the FCC can be trusted to do the Right Thing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
All the players who have power: (read the large businesses), get together and have a scrum. Not invited to the table are the (1) the public, or (2) the content creators. - both of which are large and mostly unorganized groups of individuals.
Sounds suspiciously like the process the industry went through to re-invent copyright law.
One only needs to be guaranteed "Rights" in the context of Wrongs. Comcast and Virgin and others should get their head completely out of their ass and start providing a real **customer** focused service (instead of profit-driven) and this whole issue goes away.
So you have the right to be screwed over by the corporations, who have the right to buy whatever Congressmen they need to get their consumer-unfriendly legislation passed to maintain their monopoly.
Ain't it grand?
If Comcast were the last surviving ISP on the planet, I'd go back and totally focus on Ham radio. There is not enough money in the world that could get me back to Comcrap. The service was terrible, customer service even worse. They hire the most unskilled people to do the work and rely on a few people with skills as leads. They are so over priced for what you get it isn't funny.
Comcast can keep their so-called agreements. They need federal regulation big-time!!!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Finally?
I think you misunderstand.
Rights are for the ISPs.
Responsibilities are for the users.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Much this will depend on whether or not our Internet connections are considered commodities or utilities.
If Comcast and other cable companies want to consdier connectivity a commodity, it would mean that Comcast is essentially providing the information we're accessing and have a say in exercising control over what we can have.
Personally, I would prefer our Internet access be regulated as a utility, like water and electricity. The water and electric companies do not generally limit or restrict our access to water or electricity except in exceptional circumstances like a severe water shortage or power grid failure. As a public utility, ISPs should not be in the business of censoring what traverses their networks or favoring certain content over others except as prescribed by law (e.g. the earlier post that mentioned giving bittorrent packets a lower priority but not throttling them completely).
However, if we adopt a utility model that does not allow ISPs to charge based on content, it may also allow ISPs to charge based on metered usage, just like we pay for water and electricity. Part of the regulator's job is to ensure those charges are fair and equitable.
Either way, the days of low-cost flat-rate free-flowing Internet service may be numbered.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Now that's a COMCRAPTIC idea if I've heard of one before. Then again, I guess that the bonus checks were a little light this year...
Simply put...If you lie down with dogs...you get up with fleas.
Greetings, Exhalted ones! I am Anonymous Coward, Slashdot Nerd, and friend of P2P. I know that you are powerful, mighty Comcast, and that your anger
with P2P must be equally powerful. I seek an audience with Your Greatness to bargain for P2P's life. With your wisdom, I'm sure that we can work out an arrangement which will be mutually beneficial and enable us to avoid any unpleasant confrontation. As a token of my goodwill, I present to you a gift: these two Britney Spears torrents. Both are overrated, but will serve you well.
You can profit from this, or be destroyed...
I expect that the definition of "Rights" in "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the same as the one in "Digital Rights Management". There will be a whole lot you can't do, and very little that you can do, which you already had before the bill.
P2P Bill of Restrictions?
Not that comca$t would ever go for it...
But they could alleviate a CRAPLOAD of the alleged "stress" caused by BT.
They should write a "BT proxy" that intelligently caches torrents and saves them craploads of border router bandwidth.
Just like an HTTP proxy, it would localize information and make it go faster.
CC might not save any internal bandwidth, but since they won't be able to stop BT, they could at least step aside and reduce strain on its edge routers.
My rights as a consumer is unlimited use of your network, as you advertised it as "Unlimited Internet."
Anything else is weasel-speek and semantics. You sell unlimited broadband internet. Stop trying to get us to not use what we paid for.
Well this is good news. I guess we have nothing to worry about now. All of you Comcast subscribers should be able to sleep easy now that there's no worry that your 50 gig hentai video pack torrent won't get shut down in the middle of the night.
Comcast is proposing this because only they want to control it. We don't need regulations, we need Comcast to the right thing. If they sell a 8/2 line (or what ever it is) then they should actually provide 8/2 24/7/365 .. It's not our fault that most of their users don't use maxim capacity on the line.. they cant bank on that.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Somehow I was under the impression that the Internet is a decentralized network with all traffic on the Internet running between two peers. What, then, falls under the category of P2P? What doesn't?
Incorrect. Anti-trust regulations came into existence precisely because what you said looks good on paper, but doesn't work in the real world. Example: Standard Oil.
Comcast came into existence because of a government granted monopoly. Take away that status and they don't lose their market-monopoly power overnight. Oh, you're definitely idealistic, bright eyed, and bushy tailed. You're either a huge celebrity, or you're young. Good luck to you.
This highlights the fallacy that the ISPs use in the discussion: That there is something special about P2P traffic. All traffic on the internet is peer to peer. The internet is not a top-down network like cable TV. A web server is just a computer that is connected to the internet, like my computer or my neighbor's. The attempt to legitimize P2P throttling is a spearhead for demolishing network neutrality.
That reminds me of a favorite quote: "A democracy is two wolves and a small lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
It's usually spuriously (IMHO) attributed to Ben Franklin, and the quote changes as you find it across the net, but it's always deliciously entertaining in the spirit of Poor Richard.
Exactly the self-regulation model the airlines have been getting away with for years. Look where that's gotten us. Stranded, starving, stuck in voice mail hell and grounded. Self-regulation has never been of the slightest benefit to the consumer.
So yeah, why not trust ComCast and their ilk when they say we can trust them not to rape us in the wallets in some imaginative new way? Either the "Bill of Rights" will have loopholes a whale could fit through or penalties for violating it won't match a CEO's shoeshine bill.
Regulate these assholes now, and make penalties for failure to comply really, really hurt. Something like 1% of their last quarter's net profits, increasing by 1% per day until they do as they're damned well told.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How about this?
1) Comcast's customers shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. pay their bill).
2) Comcast shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. deliver any network traffic without prejudice).
QoS is a set of defined IETF protocols. By injecting RST packets as a form of QoS Comcast is defining their own QoS standard without IETF ratification.
By dropping Comcast's AS routes due to non-compliance with RFCs wouldn't this "encourage" them to change their tune quickly?
And this is different from a ToS with punishment for breaking it ... how?
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature
And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.
Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.
Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Is how long until they start using the cameras they want to put in settop boxes to take pictures of people downloading music through P2P and sell the pictures to the RIAA.
Why do I think this is going to be more responsibilities than rights?
What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.
Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.
But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.
It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.
To illustrate the fundamental difference:
- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.
- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.
But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.
Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.
I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.
I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dan Kaminsky suggested at a talk last year that once it really catches on for ISPs to edit the ads of web pages on the fly, then everyone with an ad-supported web page will have an incentive to do everything over SSL.
He also suggested a different way to discuss net neutrality: he uses the phrase "provider hostility" to describe the opposite of net neutrality.
>>>"lines should be owned by the state or local municipalities"
Yeah because local, state and/or national governments have done such a wonderful job with their ownership of the Retirement plan (SS almost bankrupt), the roads (rising tolls and decreasing maintenance), the right-of-ways for cable tv lines (bribes to politicians to gain permanent monoopoly), and the government-owned schools (duh; where's the U.S. located on a world map? Who knows? Certainly not a gov't graduation.).
Pass.
Anything the government touches is doomed to provide poor service and/or esclating prices. The best way to solve a problem is to keep government as far away as possible, and instead introduce competition between multiple companies (i.e. have Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox all competing to supply television/internet to your home). A free market solution is preferable to a poorly-run, poorly-managed government monopoly.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
"Bill of Rights"???
This phrase doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore unfortunately. It's just a marketing slogan in this context.
It's a (false) euphemism, like "Greener Forests Act" or "No Child Left Behind" or "Patriot Act" or "Department of Defense". And in this case, it's coming from a corporation that we all already know has (or is in pursuit of) an evil monopoly.
Public school education taught me that I already had a lot of these rights protected by (or required for) our democratic free-market capitalist society's existence. The real world has so far only shown me otherwise.
Move all sig!
STEAL is an awfully strong word, and one which comes with all sorts of connotations which hold in the case of real-world meatspace ownership but not in digital media.
Framing the debate in this way will only serve to poison the well when there are real, legitimate rights that need to be discussed.
If you honestly need a primer about the things which are at stake that do NOT involve piracy, then you probably can't do better than looking up a Larry Lessig lecture or two on YouTube.
Regardless, the "industry needs to change" rhetoric is real. Whether you trust the motives of the people advancing these arguments or not, (sure, a lot of them just want stuff for free) the point remains that the big players in the content industry wagered their livelihoods on certain engineering and technical ideas (like scarcity) which are simply no longer true. For their business to continue, the rest of us will have to live with legislating away all of the abundance which digital technology could be providing us.
Copyright or not, that is not something I'm willing to live with.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
You're neglecting the obvious answer of Apple's servers being overloaded. Might wanna do some more testing.
Are you prepared to just grow some fucking respect for other peoples hard work? or do they FORCE you to download copyright material.
fucking moron.
That is pure BS. I do not download illegal software online yet I do still care about this issue. Amazing eh? I DO download linux distros over bittorrent. I DO send large files over the net for work or to friends. I DO stream legal music quite often while I work (mainly from thesixtyone.com). And I DO spend far too much money for a higher speed connection and I WILL get royally pissed when my spead appears to be throttled.
I do not mind working WITH ISPs however to ensure bandwitdh isn't being wasted. Most people that abuse P2P don't even realize they are doing it. They leave programs open that constantly upload files and they are for the most part totally unaware of this fact. So troddling down P2P uploads to a RESONABLE speed and not a tiny fraction of what it should be, is ok with me.
They could also send automated emails to high traffic users and let them know that their usage appears high and there may be something they should be concerned with. After all, if they have a trojan and their system has been turned into a ZOMBIE and is spamming traffic all the time, they probably want to stop that just as much as comcast does. An email with some information and links might also get some people to better understand their usage and curb it without comcast even having to use all these catch all methods that just piss people off.
Yep. I wish there was some sort of way to measure true legal p2p traffic vs. illegal downloading of movies, music, and games. Just off the top of my head, I'm guessing that the illegal portion is somewhere in the high 90% range, as a modest guess. Just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean they aren't the rules. Its too expensive to buy the song on iTunes or some other online music store? Then don't buy it. It doesn't give you the right to go download it because you disagree with the price. Everyone is pissed at the RIAA and every claims that "they can't PROVE that the file was actually the song it was named." And you are right, and the RIAA is asking for way more money then is owed them. But do you think any reasonable and sane person is going to believe that you just happened to have 4000 files with different names that were all song titled differently? Coincidence? Hardly. Stop crying because you got caught.
Comcast is trying trying to control P2P applications by deciding what applications can use P2P technology. So in my mind, Comcast wants 'authorized' P2P software to add a fingerprint to their torrent files being shared to determine if the software is not illegal. This in turn, gives them control over what is transmitted over the internet. So Comcast will not throttle all P2P files, rather only P2P files not identified as legal content. Comcast wants to control content over the internet in my eyes.
[Political Attack Warning]
Comcast is a capitalistic business and the company now sees the chance to cash in on a budding technological advancement. No longer will the socialistic approach to the internet exist, instead the Internet will transform into a business model controlled by money.
Couldn't agree more. Sadly it's becoming 'accepted wisdom' here that stealing peoples work is 'sticking it to the man' and 'fighting for internet freedom'.
*sigh*
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Beware your saviors that come dressed with hardhats.
But I will be the last! And, if I have the last laugh, Comcast can't have it!
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
Wolf offers to herd sheep and keep them safe.
Got any proof of your assertions?
Then shut up. (Notice how I just assume the answer is no?)
You aren't describing me or anyone that I know well enough to know whether you could be describing them. I'll accept that there ARE people such as you are asserting "the majority" to be, but I don't know anyone like that, so unless you have proof that it is common, moderate your tone or just shut up.
I suspect you of describing yourself, but I have no proof that this is so. And perhaps you are describing at least some of your friends. But I've already acknowledged that such people exist. That is no evidence that there is any sizable number of them. The popularity of iTunes argues against it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Swarms and multicast are just like poop and flies, they may stink and you may not like them, but they belong together.
Straw man arguments are lies.
what the hell are you even talking about, AC? Do you have a response to my post or not?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The problem is a monopoly on cable right-of-way granted by government. If the government owned the lines, there would still be a monopoly, and competition would still have a problem getting in.
Ever notice that all the serious competitors for last-mile connectivity service in the US (cable, telco, electric company) are the ones who already have negotiated access to that right-of way?
The solution is not allowing anyone to have monopoly control over that right-of-way. Regulated access, sure, but no contracts with (say) Comcast saying no other cable company may provide service to this area.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What? Is this a joke? Like the poster child of abusive and targeted filtering suddenly wants to proposes their version of a "Internet Bill of Rights". Somehow, I question your motives....
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Note to Comcast: You've already had self-regulation. It didn't work and that's why you're in this mess.
You have a completely misguided view of how all of this works (i.e. you are wrong). People don't download music they would have otherwise surely bought. In fact that's usually not the case. To say it's always a choice of "buy or download for free" is to be disingenuous, because it is as likely to simply "download for free or not do nothing." As for why, it could be to sample something before choosing to purchase it. It could be because $1/song or $15/CD is too expensive for many people and they couldn't afford to pay even if downloading for free weren't an option.
So, most downloads are NOT lost sales even in theory.
Oh, by the way, the whole "you don't have the right to download it" rhetoric is misleading. You don't have the right to distribute. That's the right the RIAA+gang is claiming infringement of. Piracy is ripping + distributing. Downloading is not piracy.
I like basketball!!1!
That or much more likely is that you go a different route from your company to apple.com than you do using Comcast; and that route is less congested, etc.
To get to Apple: Comcast may send it's data from your house to ATT to MCI to Apple
To get to Apple: Comcast from your house to work, work to BellSouth to MCI to Apple
If there is a choke point from Comcast to ATT you will get poor performance if work to Bellsouth is uncongested
An interstate normally is a lot faster/shorter than surface roads to get to places... except when there is an accident, at 5pm, etc. then using going out of the way to use surface roads can be faster.
That is why they are not going after the downloader. They are going after the distributors. If $1/song or $15/CD is too expensive then go without. Whether you would have bought the book or not doesn't give you any more RIGHTS to the music for free. That is such a bull$hit argument. Whether you would have bought it or not doesn't make it OK that you download it for free. If a band or record company wants to allow people to sample tracks (like they do in the stores and online at most music sites) then that is their business to respond to what the customer wants. You don't have the right to tell them what to charge. Its not yours, keep your grubby hands off if you don't like it. I would love to know when listening to someone's songs became some Right that the RIAA is trying to take away. YOU have a completely misguided view of how all of this works (I.E. YOU ARE WRONG).
Comcast wants to do this so they can control it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
4th sentence should reference song, not book.
Why should customers who do not use Peer-To-Peer Applications suffer the lack of bandwidth from those people who do nothing but download and upload Content? I am all for blocking/limiting/restricting P2P applications if it will allow me to use my internet at full speed and not be slowed down due to the Battlestar Galactica geek next door downloading seasons after seasons of the show, and taking up bandwidth I pay for.
"If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours ... I'm just using what I paid for."
Torodung--apt handle.
Comcast doesn't even approach being a monopoly and it operates in a highly competitive environment. Was anyone paying any attention to the bandwidth auction?
If it's trying to position itself in self-defence against government incursions in the market, one can only wish it well, watch carefully as events unfold, and try to learn something from it.
One of the minor comedies on slashdot is watching people twist themselves into knots on the subject of government interference. The primary principle seems to be "The government should leave me alone, but it's OK if it interferes in your life."
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Bias would be if I colored Comcast as "self-serving," "dishonest," or "besieged by wicked P2P pirates." I did call them a "great monopoly," because I had decided against the word "successful" as too biased. As far as the rest of the summary, the only color commentary I made was to describe government regulation as "evil" (through inference) by suggesting that Comcast thought self-regulation would be a "lesser evil" to government intervention, which so near to an inarguable fact that I would classify it as style.
But since you are offended, I apologize for that bit of bias. Government regulation is not "evil." It is just slow, blunted by committees, outdated by the time it becomes law, and historically plagued by unintended consequences, not the least of which was encouraging the lack of competition in the cable markets that makes Comcast a monopoly in the first place.
I amend that to a "necessary evil," when the consumer has nowhere else to turn, or when previous regulation has serious unintended consequences which cannot be remedied by market forces. That's more than a mouthful, and I'm glad I didn't put it in the summary.
Other than that, if you don't like the facts surrounding the case, that's tough. Comcast's alleged actions have prompted an FCC hearing. There are claims that they are forging packets and that service is declining across the board because they have supposedly overpromised bandwidth and are engaging in arbitrary denial of service. I would be utterly remiss to fail to mention that Comcast is a monopoly in many areas, and that it is responding to FCC pressure.
That is the context surrounding Comcast's P.R. statement, which I quoted in the summary, and linked as an article. If it made the linked P.R. exercise seem shady, it is your bias that makes it thus.
I honestly hope Comcast can fix this internally, and as a writer, I am a strong proponent of copyright. Your analysis of the kind of person who is angry with Comcast's monkey business is marred by specious assumptions and personal bias.
--
Toro
All the Comcasts of the world really need to do here is to reorganize their offerings so they make sense.
If I'm paying for x mbps up and y mbps down a month then that seems to imply a given volume up and down. They've been shown to surreptitiously cap people that actually use that implied volume. So they should be truthful about $billed_amount = $upspeed_rate * $upvolume_rate + $downspeed_rate * $downvolume_rate
They'll either try to enforce a higher price than they should because a lot of their customers are currently overcharged (ie, don't use near the implied volume) or they'll lose money.
In the first case, customers will look and say, "I'm not paying the same amount as before for the same speed but much lower volume." Comcast will be forced to be reasonable in their pricing.
So then they will be in the business of promoting more use than now, to keep their revenue growing. They'll have a great incentive to increase their network capacity.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
Sooo it looks like they are actually now afraid of being legislated/regulated out of existence, or just broken up like they should be.
Not that anything they say will be binding or actually happen, but its nice to see customer outrage is having an effect after all. I figured they were beyond that stage already.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Whenever somebody says "social security won't be there by the time I retire", you know why I roll my eyes?
Because seniors vote in record numbers.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Without regulation, there would be more companies like Comcast, not less. The barrier to entry isn't laws limiting companies from laying cable, but the cost in doing so. And of course once a company ponies up the money to do so, they're going to try and keep anyone else from doing the same. Also known as a monopoly.
You have the right to your own opinion, but you don't have the right to your own set of facts. And the fact is that government investment and regulation means more competition amongst ISP's, not less, as other countries have proven. It means faster access and lower prices; some people in Asia or Europe can get better access than your local college for half as much money as a Comcast customer pays for a small fraction of that speed.
Deregulation for the sake of deregulation is as foolhardy as more regulation for the sake of more regulation. Air fares were falling faster before the airlines were deregulated. Since then, airlines have lost billions while prices have gone up for anyone not traveling between major metropolitan areas. Countries with single payer health care get better treatment for less than half what Americans pay for private insurance.
Finally, telecos can complain about regulation when they pay back the subsides they were given to build networks and start paying rent on all the land that their lines run across. Until that happens, they can take their regulation - and like it.
... Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you..."But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered. So, it seems like you are saying that Comcast is a bit like John Pinette's chinese buffet owner?
"You go home now, fatboy! You been here four hour!
How about COMCAST sells 6mbit service to its consumers with the knowledge that each consumer has paid for and expects 6mbit of transfer AT ALL TIMES. You do not sign up for 6mbit for a quick burst, you sign up because thats what you want and thats what you're paying for. If they need to charge more, then do so; but COMCAST NEEDS TO STOP SELLING A PRODUCT THEY CANNOT MAINTAIN OR START SELLING A PRODUCT THAT THE BUYER CAN USE AS ADVERTISED AND PURCHASED. Thats the simple answer. The BBB needs to slam Comcast for selling a promise they won't keep.
Here's what one power co says in their pole attachment FAQs: " If you are working on a State or County Highway, you must obtain a highway work permit from that agency. You should also check national, state, county and local municipal codes."
So it would appear the government can stop you from cutting a deal with the utility pole owners. As for laws prohibiting cable company competition, the Cato Institute disagrees with you: "Consequently, most municipalities intervene in the market and do not permit two cable companies to compete directly for subscribers.
Research, it's a wonderful thing!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, I didn't think you'd try to back up your craven strawman. Loser.