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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
If you count every forged TCP RST packet as a violation, that would mean damages in the billions.
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!
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?