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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."
Yea, when I am running torrents what Comcast does to me is make it so I drop like 30-80% of all (not just torrent) of my packets every 5-10 minutes, then it comes back up (tested via pings). My torrents are still blazing fast when I actually have a connection. All I do is spoof my router's MAC to a random number, release and renew my IP (to chick they give me a new one) and my internet works PERFECT for 2 days until they start the process over again. Annoying, but it's amazing they are so stupid they won't associate my IP with my MODEMS MAC instead of the router/PC. BTW, If I shut off my torrents after getting a new IP, I *never* need to reset the MAC as they never force me to drop packets.
adventure-today.com
No it isn't legal. They deliberately forged messages ( RST packages ) that were sent over the phone lines. That is a federal crime.
Yes, I've heard that theory, but it's a huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that forged packets are some sort of illegal impersonation. I don't like what Comcast did, but I also don't like using abusing unrelated laws.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you sell something you don't own (bandwidth), then it's your fault, not the buyers.
What's really needed is QoS. You get X MB per month of high quality, Y MB per month at medium quality and Z MB (maybe z=inf) at low quality, and a final unlimited lowest quality, throttled down to something quite small.
Your app sets the QoS level it wants (eg voip sets high quality). When you run out of the quality level set, traffic automatically gets demoted to the next one you have. Or, you can buy more a la carte.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Your sense of legality and illegality are the crux for a need to understand more than I can explain in this forum. Competition means unfettered pipes, which is what the FCC is ostensibly punishing Comcast for-- non-"net neutrality".
And I haven't been called kid in over 40 years!
Additionally, after 14 books, and heaven-only-knows how many articles I've written, I've discovered that my choice of communications is my own, and those that would not understand emphasis via punctuation are looney. Two days ago, it was my choice of the word gendarme-- meaning policeman. Someone believed that the only correct use had to do with syntax connoting only French and only military policing.... all here on /.
You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts. There.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.