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Legal Trouble For Multiple ISPs
Ars Technica reports that Comcast has been hit with three new class-action lawsuits due to the company's traffic-shaping practices. "The lawsuits ... ask that Comcast be barred from continuing to violate various state laws, in addition to unspecified damages." Meanwhile, members of the US House Telecommunications Subcommittee have asked Charter Communications' president to stop testing a program which uses Deep Packet Inspection to track the habits of its customers. A number of privacy groups have voiced their support (PDF). As if that weren't enough, it seems the City of Los Angeles is suing Time Warner for fraud and deceptive business practices. The Daily News notes, "... the City Attorney is seeking $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law as well as an additional $2,500 civil penalty for each violation described in the complaint perpetrated against one or more senior citizens or disabled persons."
"I am above ze law!" <adds goop to hair>
All 3 ISPs are cable companies with heavy investment in distribution of content from the major media companies. Distribution that is threatened both by piracy and by "free" content being distributed on line.
Everyone loves unlimited bandwidth and being off-the-meter. But by selling bandwidth with zero incremental usage cost, they're really just having the light users subsidize the heavy users. That's what really causes problems like this. Sure, bandwidth is cheap, but the whole reason that they're having problems that require traffic shaping is that their bandwidth is NOT unlimited.
I know consumers (myself included) enjoy not having to think about bandwidth usage, but maybe there could be a better pricing model that more appropriately sets the costs of the bandwidth for heavy users.
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Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
I disagree about limited bandwidth. The problem is that bandwidth is flexible, and cheap. If you don't buy enough that's no fault other than the ISP themselves.
You can always set up emergency tier 1 ISP lease plans where they lease you extra bandwidth so you don't end up short, although its less cost efficient than making an enormous profit off light users to subsidize the heavy ones.
The current way we deal with internet (consumer to corporation) is like charging X dollars/gallon for gas, but only if you buy less than 5 gallons a month....sure, the super light cars would live painfully, but the SUV owners (and other things that guzzle gas but are legit such as diesel, freight, airplanes) would be screaming out. For internet purposes replace diesel, freight, airplanes with fileservers, bittorrent, streaming video, and downloaders/gamers. Yes, at that extreme just like internet, people will stop using it as much, because at that point it becomes practically extortion (and in the case of gas, the oil industry would be kaputz/pay in blood for charging so much, however there is competition enough that if they all do that there are other gas options). When there are no options, this extortion has no retribution, thats where we're at now with internet.
This comparison isn't 100%, but it's the closest I could think of at the time.
Don't like comcast, time warner, etc? You have nowhere to go, and you're paying the 20$ no matter what you drive, even though they could be charging 2$ or 3$.
It's ridiculously cheap to make a fast wireless mesh network in a decent sized neighborhood even without subsidies....(say 600 people who can average comcast's download speed for upload as well ends up around 60$/month )kinda makes you wonder just how much is siphoned to CEO's, huh?
Sure, bandwidth is cheap, but the whole reason that they're having problems that require traffic shaping is that their bandwidth is NOT unlimited.
We paid for their build out and have yet to see the benefits of that tax break. I call it even.
I am against any sort of control by government busy-bodies. Don't like it, go elsewhere, like russia.
Would it be ok for the USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL to all practice opening your packages and throwing out stuff to make it easier (cheaper) to deliver your package?
If they all did it or you only had one of them in your area then you don't have much of an alternative do you?
With corporations with more money in the bank than the GDP of many small nations, I think its time we start treating them as governments too and have some sort of restriction on how they behave.
Otherwise, one could only imagine they'd have no qualms encouraging the regular government giving them power to search your house without a warrant if it made them a quarterly profit.
BTW and kind of off topic... Do you know why oil is 136 a barrel? It is because speculative corporations like Goldman Sachs are driving the market trying to get $200 a barrel. So the next time you fill up your gas tank, thank those unregulated futures speculators.
I'm all for the free market, but when corporations behave like governments and as de facto monopolies then they either need to be regulated or dissolved into smaller yet competing bodies.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
That's exactly what they should do. They should charge per bandwidth. The problem is exactly that they aren't doing that. They advertise unlimited service, but then they go and snipe connections and disconnect users who use more than an unspecified amount. They need to be up front and honest about what they provide and how much it costs. Hopefully these lawsuits will make a dent in these crimes.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Living here in The Netherlands it's almost hard to imagine how it can be so bad over there in the US.
... how the **** do you guys put up with it! It sounds like your living in some internet stone age where regional monopolies are trying to squeeze every dime out of you they can without having to provide much service to their customers at all ... it sounds outragous!
For me bandwidth has been un-metered, un-throttled, un-shaped, unlimited and un-restricted in all senses of the word for the last decade or so. And while i do pay 50 euro's (~ 75USD) a month, i get 20mbit with great service, a personal home page, spam filtering and all the other services you would expect from an ISP, plus they never blocked any ports so running your own http/smtp/imap/etc server from home is no problem either. (there are a lot of cheaper options, you could get 4mbit with no restrictions for about 12 euro's a month but then you would loose a bit in the service and quality department).
I guess my question is
That's about right. I have a choice between DSL and Cable for high speed internet (satellite is too high latency). Luckily my cable company treats me well (15mbps/2mbps for $55/mo) but the DSL service is horrible. If the cable company made changes like these I wouldn't have much of an alternative...
It's ridiculous. I hope somebody who actually has a brain gets in the FCC and forces the telcos to actually use the $200 Billion we've given them so far to improve the infrastructure...like we PAID them for with tax dollars.
So in other words, you're in favor of a free market. The chief problems with the government running things is that it's an overly-powerful body that can exert undue influence, and they aren't subject to the normal market forces that would keep things running well. Monopolies have the same problems.
You can be in favor of the free market, with no qualifications, and then there's a separate question: What do we do with the markets that are run by monopolies, and therefore aren't free? Thinking the government should regulate those monopolies does not make you a communist. Particularly not when, as in the case of cable/telephone companies, the monopoly is enforced by the government.
If you count every forged TCP RST packet as a violation, that would mean damages in the billions.
Government generaly have, you know, elections.
So sure, right now they are already like governments; dictatorships, to be precise.
Forget Shaping, how about active censorship of some websites. ...snip...
here's the traceroute:
5 pos-5-0-0-ar01.albuquerque.nm.albuq.comcast.net
6 te-0-7-0-0-cr01.atlanta.ga.ibone.comcast.net
7 te-0-0-0-0-cr01.stratford.tx.ibone.comcast.net
8 comcast-ip-services-llc-los-angles.tengigabitethernet6-3.ar4.lax1.gblx.net
9 tengigabitethernet6-3.ar4.lax1.gblx.net (64.211.110.153)
10 port80.ge-2-0-0.407ar1.arn1.gblx.net (207.138.144.102)
11 * *
As you can see it dies in comcasts network. I can still get to piratebay.org via anonymous proxy, so it's definitely a comcast issue.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This reminds me of possibly the most disturbing image I've ever seen on 4chan... And 4chan of all places! I don't have it saved but it really did make me crap a house, especially when I realised the poster wasn't kidding.
... And I wouldn't put it past them even for a second.
The image?
19.99$: Basic service: Access to MSN, Yahoo, (various other sites)
29.99$: Premium service! Access to MSN, Yahoo!, Facebook, CNet, (other sites)!
49.99$: Extreme service! Access to over 100 web sites! Even youtube!
The most interesting argument I've heard against domestic drilling is not environmental. There's a limited amount of oil available. How do we want to use it? Produce a plausible plan for oil usage over the next 50 years involving known domestic oil reserves plus imports. For almost any reasonable such plan, you'll discover we're using oil faster than we want to be. We should be saving it for later, by leaving it in the ground right now. It's far less painful to wean ourselves off it over an extended period of time than to extract it as fast as we can and then run out at a similar pace.
the argument of speculation just doesn't hold water
Aha.
Quote: "A panel of experts told a Senate committee on Capitol Hill Tuesday that rising oil prices have a direct connection to manipulation of U.S. energy futures markets, and federal regulators failed in their responsibility to protect consumers.
Among the experts who testified were Michael Greenberger, JD, professor at the School of Law and a former director at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Greenberger argued that basic market fundamentals are only a piece of what explains the current cost of crude oil.
"I think the price is completely unmoored from supply-demand," said Greenberger."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
..oh, and BTW boys and girls, according to results of the glasnost test run not more than 48 hours ago, Comcast is STILL inserting bogus TCP reset packets into BitTorrent streams; TFA says that Comcast had agreed to stop doing that. Big surprise! They're LYING.
Everything is elastic. When people can no longer afford gas, they won't be buying it.
They'll be stealing it.
They'll be getting fired for not being able to make it to work anymore. They'll be living off of welfare/food stamps because they can't afford to move closer to the jobs.
The demand is going to go down from all of these people not being able to afford it. But the price drop will not be immediate. By the time the price starts to drop, output and refinery capacity will be reduced to compensate for the decreased demand. Speculators will still be playing the "..it could rise sharply at any time!" game.
Speculators hope that the price rises like they've been betting on so that they'll make more money.
Speculators fail to realize that if they trigger an economic depression that their money won't be worth a whole lot anymore. Inflation will more than make up for any gains they have made off of the market.
In the end? Everyone loses.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This is correct. The Federal Reserve creates bubble after bubble by counterfeiting the money supply, even if it's hidden by grossly manipulating official inflation measurement indexes such as the CPI, and removing the M3 total money supply number from official Fed reports. The late '90s internet bubble, the housing bubble, and now the commodities bubble. It's exactly like stepping on bumps in a rug; one bump deflates while another bump pops up elsewhere underneath the rug. Newly printed money and credit is going to be spent, rigorously in economic terms *traded*, for other specific goods first as opposed to the goods where that new money is not traded first.
Oil is a *futures* driven market. If the market fears the USA is going to attack Iran and lead to supply problems in the future, prices of futures contracts will reflect that in the present pricing of futures contracts. Absolutely every single good and service is priced *subjectively*, incorporating fears, dreams, beliefs, fashion, fads, you name it. Map out the price of oil over decades, hell map it out for the last century, and you'll see that price corresponds extremely closely to the devaluation of fiat currency, even in spite of a huge increase in demand and supply.
If the supply and demand remain constant, but you double the supply of money, what you expect to happen? That's right, the same amount of oil will trade for double the amount of money. Read the Creature from Jekyll Island which has a review on this site.
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/26/1432203
Here's an e-book about government interference manipulation of the supply and price of oil. It's far from a free market if private companies can't drill in Alaska.
http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
I understand what you're saying. However, the various oil companies are invested in biofuels and could conceivably be producing them in quantity, so they could probably make more. I can only assume that they're not doing this for one of two reasons based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of the situation: either they're trying to milk the dino juice as long as possible because you don't change horses in mid-stream, or they're concerned about the OPEC response to anything that fucks with their monopoly on oil.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html
Controlling energy prices controls movement and controls people. The government thanks you for your dependency on water, food, and oil.
Pharmaceutical companies push a lot of drugs by marketing. How much marketing is involved in the diamond industry, from engagement and wedding rings to jewelry for special occasions? Gotta have those bling bling rims spinners around the fingers and hanging from necks and ears. Otherwise what's the status of karats if your 50,000 album record collection can be "pirated" by just any old peon by clicking a mouse button?
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
I don't understand how anyone trying to operate a business can operate over a cable modem. You can't upload anything. Sure, you can download at 12-20Mb but upload speeds are often 128K or even less. And then when the school children get home, your service drops to nothing.
If you had a T1 you would get 1.5MB both up and down with dedicated bandwith that nobody can interfere with, no matter what they are doing in your neighborhood.
Yes, it is more expensive than cable, but you get RELIABLE bandwidth and RELIABLE performance. What I have seen from cable is a burst at 12Mb and then a long, long time at 1Mb, if that. If you know it is going to take 30 minutes to upload a web site to a server then you can plan for it. If it might take 5 minutes or it might take 4 hours what sort of planning can you do?
How can anyone seriously use a cable modem for business purposes?
You can just spin the company controlling the last mile off into a corporation that can only break even. Then order them to give the same rates to all of the CLECS.
Problem solved.
I read Greenberger's testimony, and here's the important part of what he said:
So in a market where there are no CFTC rules or government oversight, there is speculation. Surprise surprise. But ICE is not where oil is physically settled. ICE WTI (West Texas Intermediate) is cash settled against the prevailing market price for US light sweet crude (what's traded on NYMEX). If the speculators are fleeing to ICE because they can't get their way on NYMEX, then my point still holds: the price of NYMEX light sweet crude (LSC) should decline right before front-month expiration because the speculators have to sell to avoid taking delivery (which they don't have to worry about on ICE), and the price between NYMEX and unregulated, OTC crude prices should decouple. NYMEX crude should be priced on pure supply-demand on the expiration day, so either real buyers are supporting the price or the speculators are somehow dodging delivery.