FCC Votes To Punish Comcast

MaineCoasts brings news that three out of the five FCC commissioners have voted in favor of punishing Comcast for their P2P throttling practices. The investigation of Comcast has been underway since January, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made clear their conclusion a couple weeks ago. Ars Technica has coverage as well, noting: "The initial report on the vote said nothing about which way Republican commissioners McDowell and Tate might lean. FCC watchers wouldn't be at all surprised to see both vote against the order; the really interesting moment could come if they support it. Having four or even five commissioners support the order would send a strong bipartisan signal to ISPs that they need to take great care with any sort of discriminatory throttling based on anything more specific than a user's total bandwidth."

Comments

Re:Finally!!!

[phulegart]

It doesn't work out that way though. I'll see that blazing speed if I download the linux ISOs via an HTTP link, or from an FTP site. Of course, if anything were to go wrong while I'm downloading that 700mb to 3gb.. then I'm out of luck and I have to download it all over again. However, I"ll see plenty of blazing speed.

Sure, I could and probably should get a download assist program like GetRight... or maybe I should even start using BitComet and have it intercept the clicks... but even then, some servers will recognize that the click has been intercepted, and not allow what I want to download, to be downloaded by BitComet. I've had it happen enough where I had to turn off that feature and download some files "manually"

But the speed is there. The speed is there for watching Youtube videos. The speed is there for listening to streaming music with VLC.

It is only Bittorrent traffic that will cause the ISP to get upset and start messing with the connection.

So when someone sells a connection promising blazing speeds, and DELIVERS said blazing speeds, and then it turns out that this company is pretty much shaping the torrent traffic to eliminate those blazing speeds until there is no more torrent traffic... I'd say there's nothing wrong.

People who aren't torrenting don't ever see this crap.