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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."
So whose side is the FCC on? they seem pretty two-faced to me.
Mmmmh... a contradictory double-sided bias.. what could it possibly mean... maybe... I don't know.. a lack of bias?
You just got troll'd!
It's not a legislative arm. It has broad legislated enforcement mandates from Congress, going back to the early-mid 1930s on communications policy and enforcement. It is IN FACT an enforcement arm, upheld by SCOTUS. The US President, as in theexecutive branch appoints the commisioners.
That said, I don't agree with a lot of what they do, and they do have considerable power, but power that's not unlike that of the EPA, the military, and so on.
So is the Comcast pending fine a good idea? You bet. Once the pandora's box of stepping on protocols to favor another is open, it can't be shut. This sends a great signal to carriers that they'd best not fool with consumer access. Be a good carrier; don't mess with protocols to favor your own perceived traffic. Controversial no doubt; a good one this time, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Isn't that convenient? The will of the people will be done, and the will of the people is that douchebag corporations don't abuse the people after being gifted billions of the peoples' tax dollars to build network infrastructure.
Blar.
Is it not at least an equally huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that it is "absolutely legal?"
Packet forging is rightly named---Comcast sends them as if they originated from me, when they did not. They do not advertise that they do it & I did not sign any document authorizing them to do it on my behalf. In fact, many AUPs prohibit forging and spoofing from their users & ISPs should be held to an even higher standard.
I call bullshit on this.
The cable companies allow access to their networks based on MAC. What you are doing is possible, but you would need to call comcast and tell them that you got a new modem every time, which would look extremely suspicious. MAC addresses are also not random. So you cannot spoof it to a "random" MAC.
Your post also lacks continuity. You say that they start dropping "30-80%" of your packets every "5-10 minutes". But you also say that you only need to reset your MAC every 2 days?
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I AM a Republican and I'm on the FCC's side.
It's debatable whether or not Comcast's conduct was legal. They advertised and sold "internet access". That has certain connotations. If instead of the promised "Internet Access" they sold a neutered version thereof, then they may have run afoul of Federal regulations.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Tiered or capped bandwidth is not the problem here. Net Neutrality is the problem.
The most fundamental way to distinguish between the two is that violations of Net Neutrality will lead to tying between different relevant markets, a critical Antitrust concern.
Tiered or capped bandwidth ALREADY EXISTS at Comcast, and has been around since the days of Compuserve and timeshared systems.
AT&T in the 1980s could charge you for every minute you were on the phone, but they sure as hell couldn't tell you that you could only call their preferred pizza delivery services. I hope you can see why that matters.
That's not what this is about. Comcast was found by the FCC to be interfering in the traffic of specific application types, violating principles established by the FCC to allow customers open access to the Internet. The customers were not charged for the bits that were blocked, so it had nothing to do with bandwidth caps.
Ok, what? They were not charged for the blocked data? Are you nuts?
As a customer you are paying for XMb/sec download by yMb/sec upload on their network, not taking account of the fact that those speeds will be affected by traffic on other networks and the actual speed of the server, you still are paying for that bandwidth continuously.
If they are messing with your traffic and/or reducing your connection speeds on their network then they are not giving you the service you payed for. And they are violating federal law that prohibits ISPs from discriminating against data types.
It would be like the phone company blocking calls from an area that a lot of people call or intentionally reducing call quality to lower the number of calls from there.
it's a huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that forged packets are some sort of illegal impersonation.
So you won't mind if I send some mail and list yours as the return address then?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Indeed, the body of FCC commissioners is designed to be double-sided.
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that the commission makes biased decisions all the time. The Republican commissioners are almost always unified, and the Democrat commissioners seem to swing over to the "regulation is bad, m'kay" position a lot of the time.