Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?

snydeq writes "Responding to legal pressure over its throttling of P2P traffic and other dubious practices, Comcast says it will now punish the most abusive users rather than particular applications. Yet its pilot tests in Pennsylvania and Virgina, which would 'delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications,' raise greater concerns over net neutrality, ones that belie a potential preemptive strike against the cable company's chief future competition: streaming video. 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"

Comments

Fundamental Flaw with Cable

[Bob9113]

This is just the fundamental flaw with cable that has been waiting to expose itself since day 1:

Cable uses a shared local loop, and they advertise it as unlimited, and they advertise it as having 5 megabits. That math does not work. It is a lie. It is false advertising. They've only been getting away with it because most customers don't use what they've been sold.

Except that is changing. Video is exposing the lies of cable, and they're proposed solution is screwing the customer. Since they've been getting away with it for so long, they believe they are entitled to continue lying and to screw their customers to protect their lies. This is false advertising that has not been painful enough to result in a lawsuit. Now it is going to get there real fast unless they do something. So they are trying to convince the world that the customers are at fault. That is another lie. Don't buy it.

Stop lying about the product. False advertising is the problem here. People expect their cable to support 5 megabits unlimited because that's what they were sold. Degrading the service to those who consume what they were sold isn't just ethically reprehensible, it is (or at least should be) illegal.

There is no question of whether protocol throttling or customer throttling is the solution to the problem. There is no problem with the product. The problem is the false advertising.