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Comcast Has 30 Days To 'Fess Up About P2P Throttling
negRo_slim writes with some welcome news from Ars Technica: "Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices' to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency warned Wednesday morning as it released its full, 67-page Order. As FCC Chair Kevin Martin said it would, the Commission's Order rejects the ISP giant's insistence that its handling of peer-to-peer applications was necessary. 'We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,' the agency declares." And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
The FCC has the regulatory power to revoke licenses and impose fines (Up to $325,000 per infraction, I believe).
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Hahahaha, that was priceless. You really think they'd throttle their own content? No, they're throttling Netflix and anyone else trying to do VOD.
Comcast offers VOD on their internal network, this costs them nothing. Netflix VOD comes over the Internet link they rent from another company, so they would rather make this unwatchable and continue to have a monopoly on content delivery.
They're preemptively trying to stamp out any competition but under the guise of "oh noes we're out of the bandwidths." Comcast charges plenty for the bandwidth you're using, but to push profits higher they need your Internet use to go down but your costs to go up. Just another instance where Wall St.'s "make more every year" mentality is going to hurt us more every year.