Slashdot Mirror
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."
for the same reasons they are being sued by LA, I believe.
Now we have Crapcast and I'm paying $20 more per month for less service.
--Minneapolis dev.
"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.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
If you run from injustice instead of fighting it, guess what, you are going to lose.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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
- "PowerBoost(r) makes fast even faster! PowerBoost(r) helps power downloads of large files like videos, music, and games at speeds up to 12 Mbps!"
- "McAfee(r) Security Suite featuring a series of tools to help keep you, your family, and your home computers safe, protected, and virus-free. A $120 value."
- And for their phone service: "Utilizes Comcast's own secure network, not the public Intedrnet, for secure VoIP phone service".
So 3 counts of fraud on ONE ad! Comcast are going to have a problem defending themselves this time...Now, do I see a "boost" of speed when downloading videos, music, and games (legal ones) from BitTorrent? NO! I NEVER even get a good connection! And at the bottom of the flyer, in that long list of fine print, it says "PowerBoost(r) provides bursts of download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5MB of a file, respectively. So I don't even get PowerBoost for longer than a second! Theres one fraud.
I have McAfee, provided by Comcast, installed on my Windows OS (I use Linux most of the time). Guess what? ANOTHER LIE! Sure, it's free now, but in a year EVERY DAMN time you turn your computer on, McAfee nags you to buy a $120 dollar subscription. MORE FRAUD!
So your saying the NSA can't listen in? More fraud...
And why doesn't it make sense that the pipes/wires/drainage belong to the people instead and then the service providers can all lease that from some management authority to gain access to the last mile and provide everyone service?
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
Yeah. OPEC, and prohibitive taxes and restrictions on domestic drilling, plus increased fossil fuels demand from developing nations.
It is because speculative corporations...
No. Speculators perform a valuable function in the free market. You're only looking at one half of the picture (the half that allows you to demonize speculators).
Speculators buy a commodity in the hopes that the price will rise. In doing so, they decrease the supply, thereby further driving up prices. (this is the "bad part" that you've fixated on). However, by driving up prices, they decrease consumption (and *please* don't trot out the "but gas is price inelastic!" argument. It's not).
The part you've neglected to mention is what happens when speculators decide to start selling their stored commodities. When a speculator guesses that scarcity is at its peak, they start selling. This increases the supply, and drives *down* price, and allowing consumption to increase.
A better way to look at speculation is this: Speculators act as "buffers" for supply and demand. They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand. Also, you left out the fact that speculation is *not* a risk-free enterprise. Speculators take considerable risks in storing commodities. If the price decreases, they've lost out! In addition, consider the fact that the rising price in oil incentivizes energy companies to develop alternate forms of energy, and maybe will even help politicians in the thrall of mindless environmentalist special interest groups see the folly of preventing domestic drilling for fossil fuels, and the development of a nuclear energy infrastructure.
If your opinion is that we ought to be consuming less fossil fuels, then speculators are doing you a favor! If your belief is that fossil fuels ought to be cheaper, so we'll use more energy, then why not just advocate for the development of nuclear power, or drilling in ANWR? Why not vocally denounce the unethical price-gouging behavior of OPEC nations? There are a lot more culprits to blame for this than speculators. In fact, they're the least of our worries.
But just because they happen to be making out like bandits right now, they're easy targets for ill-considered and thoughtless rhetoric.
"... the City Attorney is seeking $2,500 in civil penalties for each violation of the Unfair Competition law"
WTF These fines are laughable. In fact we have to rethink our policy on fines. They should be based on a percentage of your gross annual income. This should be for individuals, organizations and corporations. I would be in favor of doing this for something as simple as a parking ticket. The way it is now, the corporate board just treats it as a cost of doing business.
Where I live in San Francisco bay area, there are three main ISPs - AT&T U-verse, Astound.net and Comcast. Unfortunately in my apartment, they do not allow anybody other than Comcast to make connections. Astound is not even allowed to enter the premises, while U-verse is not allowed to make connection from the apartment junction box to my unit. That makes Comcast the default monopoly.
What surprises me is that AT&T and Astoud.net is taking this lying down. I even went personally to Astound.net office and they say my apartment address is black listed in their database (essentially meaning they will not even try to make a connection here). At least AT&T technician from U-verse came here and argued with apartment manager with no success. I wrote a letter to AT&T U-verse and did not even get courtesy of a form letter reply. Yet U_verse is wasting their marketing dollars by sending me fliers almost everyday (and to everybody else in this complex) to sign-up with U-verse.
Comcast Internet connection is the pits these days. After a minute or two of good connectivity, it drops to almost 0 bytes per second. This creates havoc even in accessing gmail. My VOIP phone or chatting with my friends on iChat becomes impossible.
The whole situation makes "voting with our dollars" impossible. By the way, I found out that other apartment dwellers in SF bay area are in similar position.
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?
They already do charge by weight to make stuff easier and cheaper to deliver, you raving neo-Bolshevikite/Trotskyite anarcho-communo-crypto-statist Marxo-Marxite-Marxist retro-phyto-gangreno-Guevarite proto-postulo-pappado-vivido-pappado-pappado-vivido-Blarite/Brownite-Barakist/Clintonite unreconstructed loon.
Seriously, how much are the telcoms paying you to make these posts?
There is no reason to get self-righteous about this. It's not as if people go to jail if they choose NOT to buy the service because they dont like the idea of subsidizing heavy users. They as light users don't see noticeable service degradation from heavy users, and they still choose to buy it. there is no "injustice" being perpetrated.
There is NO CREDIBLE REASON to charge for internet like cellphone service. What kind of stockholm syndrom do you have where you can defend this practice?
Does fedex charge by the mile? I contest that people who ship using flat-rate envelopes to the neighboring state are subsidizing people who ship using the same envelopes cross country. Do you see how stupid this sounds?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think the big fiction is that there has to be a "last mile" monopoly in the first place. That made sense back when a. there was only one telecommunications provider and b. running that last mile was prohibitively expensive. The telcos have been milking that for all it's worth: maybe it is time to eliminate that monopoly and allow some serious competition.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
it's called a republican--corporations have a god given right to march over the "lazy" people who aren't rich--appointed FCC allowing local monopoly frachise agreements. In the majority of areas there are 2 choices, "the cable company" or "the dsl company", assuming both options exist.
telecom lobbies have exercised regulatory capture for at least a decade now, and, while their agendas are much less invasive than the RIAA, have considerably greater lobbying grip on our legislatures.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If you count every forged TCP RST packet as a violation, that would mean damages in the billions.
Without control by government busy-bodies you'd have companies using sawdust as filler in their sausages... Pressing chalk dust into tablets and calling it "aspirin"... Paying children $1/day to work in hazardous conditions... You get the idea.
And without control by government busy-bodies, as we're seeing now, companies will sell you 20 GB/month and call it "unlimited".
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
They actually smooth out the peaks and valleys of supply and demand.
While I agree with you in theory, if you add in leverage and valuation bubble driven lending I'm not so sure it works out that way. The game changes when lending creates money.
If the price decreases, they've lost out!
If the price decreases they go bust and the lender loses out, which apparently translates into the Fed and taxpayers bailing them out. Structured correctly over several deals, most of the speculative profit is retained anyway, and the losses get almost completely socialized.
Supporting the freedom of the market is one thing (and a good thing, IMO), but you also have to realize that certain segments of what we have today is nothing like a free market. The banking industry in combination with fractional reserve lending distorts the effects of what _should_ be rational (and market smoothing) speculation.
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
Apparently you misunderstand how "futures" trading works. Traders (the ones you're calling speculators) do not actually buy and take delivery of commodities, thereby acting as pricing and supply buffers as you seem to think. The single thing that a futures trader never wants to do is to actually own the commodity they're trading. If this happens, they're screwed as these are guys with Park Avenue offices, summer homes in the Hamptons, and winter homes in Aspen - not warehouses or tank farms.
In the futures market, a trader simply says something like: "I'll sell you a million barrels of oil for $150 per barrel on the first of next month". He doesn't own oil wells or a million barrels of oil, he is simply offering to sell something (which is probably still deep in the earth somewhere in the world) at a particular price on a particular date in the future. If I think that oil is going to be selling for more than $150 on the first of next month, I accept his offer to sell and guarantee to give him $150 million on delivery of the million barrels. This is a contract between me and him. If, when the futures market opens for trading the next morning, I offer to sell my million barrels of July oil for $160 per barrel and find a third trader willing to pay, I simply sell my contract with the first trader to that third trader.
The first trader is still on the hook to deliver the million barrels for $150 million and the third trader is obligated to buy a million barrels for $160 million. I'm out of the deal completely. The oil is still in the ground somewhere. Nothing has actually moved from the possession of one individual to another. The $10 million difference is mine to keep.
The student who wishes more insight into futures trading might want to watch the classic 1983 film "Trading Places".
This reminds me of possibly the most disturbing image I've ever seen on 4chan... And 4chan of all places! I don't have it saved but it really did make me crap a house, especially when I realised the poster wasn't kidding.
... And I wouldn't put it past them even for a second.
The image?
19.99$: 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!
They are entering into contracts with that apartment complex to tie comcast to their rentals which is completely unrelated in order to further their market share.
this falls afoul of anti-trust law, and denies customers choice.
File a complaint with the FTC or sue comcast.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It is NOT "their traffic" at all. This is bandwidth that's been SOLD to the customers. It's not like using, say, a school or corporate network where the owner who pays the cost can shape and set policies of use at will.
A paying customer has an absolute right to use what they paid for. Dropping packets, snooping on the flows, overselling their capacity, et cetera are all inexcusable.
Really, with Comcast and Time-Warner, all we need to look at is what these company's core business is. They are content providers whose business model is threatened by the Internet.
Really, they seem to be trying to recreate the "old days" of closed and propreitary services like Compuserve or AOL.
checking who owns the last stop on the traceroute:
whois 207.138.144.102
OrgName: Global Crossing
OrgID: GBLX
Address: 14605 South 50th Street
City: Phoenix
StateProv: AZ
PostalCode: 85044-6471
Country: US
ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.gblx.net:4321
NetRange: 207.138.0.0 - 207.138.255.255
CIDR: 207.138.0.0/16
NetName: GBLX-8
NetHandle: NET-207-138-0-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NAME.ROC.GBLX.NET
NameServer: NAME.PHX.GBLX.NET
NameServer: NAME.SNV.GBLX.NET
NameServer: NAME.JFK1.GBLX.NET
Comment: THESE ADDRESSES ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-05-20
Updated: 2005-03-02
RTechHandle: IA12-ORG-ARIN
RTechName: GBLX-IPADMIN
RTechPhone: +1-800-404-7714
RTechEmail: ipadmin@gblx.net
OrgAbuseHandle: GBLXA-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: GBLX-Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-800-404-7714
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@gblx.net
OrgNOCHandle: GBLXN-ARIN
OrgNOCName: GBLX-NOC
OrgNOCPhone: +1-800-404-7714
OrgNOCEmail: gc-noc@gblx.net
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/08/1354257#
OrgTechHandle: IA12-ORG-ARIN
OrgTechName: GBLX-IPADMIN
OrgTechPhone: +1-800-404-7714
OrgTechEmail: ipadmin@gblx.net
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-06-07 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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?
Your traceroute and your conclusion are nothing alike.
Looks to me more like comcast hands it off to globalcrossing, who then takes it through what is actually their edge, and then PirateBay.org does not respond to your UDP requests, likely due to a firewall.
This can be verified with a TCP SYN based traceroute to port 80(which you know they allow). Heres one I did from a server with comcast.
TTL LFT trace to thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146):80/tcp
** [firewall] the next gateway may statefully inspect packets
1 [AS7016] [CABLE-1] 73.201.88.1 6.2/9.7ms
** [neglected] no reply packets received from TTLs 2 through 4
5 [AS7922] [COMCAST-16] te-0-4-0-1-cr01.pittsburgh.pa.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.91.129) 18.4/13.8ms
6 [ASN?] [GBLX-13] Te6-4.ar2.DCA3.gblx.net (67.17.194.97) 14.6/25.3ms
7 [AS3549] [GBLX-8] port80.ge-2-0-0.407ar1.ARN1.gblx.net (207.138.144.102) 140.7/139.9ms
8 [AS16150] [83-RIPE] [target] thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146):80 143.3/142.9ms
Now the fact that it jumps about 110ms in one hop is a little odd, but that just shows GlobalCrossing isn't exactly top of the line.
And just for another datapoint, heres the (tail of) the same route using ICMP ECHO requests instead of UDP datagrams:
5 te-0-4-0-1-cr01.pittsburgh.pa.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.91.129) 13.598 ms 14.115 ms 13.300 ms
6 Te6-4.ar2.DCA3.gblx.net (67.17.194.97) 14.536 ms 13.284 ms 16.724 ms
7 port80.ge-2-0-0.407ar1.ARN1.gblx.net (207.138.144.102) 137.295 ms 135.119 ms 136.846 ms
8 thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146) 135.577 ms 133.808 ms 131.285 ms
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx