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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.
Comcast's problem has got me thinking, has anyone implemented a QOS mechanism that works like *nix CPU time allocation? In simple terms that's where a task's priority is determined as an inverse function of the amount of CPU time it wants. It seems to me the same thing should work just fine for bandwidth allocation. You just let interactive connections have as much as they want, and the continuous hogs get whatever is left - but you do this in a protocol-agnostic way that is based solely on demand.
But: this only would be appropriate if your goal is to deliver maximal performance under full link utilization. I don't know if this is a real problem for the cable providers - I doubt if last-mile congestion is as big an issue as people think. Probably they are more concerned about reducing their total cost for bandwidth to the internet. In that case the strategy of temporarily throttling the hogs seems reasonable and fair because it is protocol-agnostic, but ONLY if the specifics of this mechanism are disclosed to the customer, and this service is NOT advertised as "unlimited".
why not (gasp!) improve your infrastructure, rather than treating your customers like cattle? If you (by you I mean Comcast) don't do it, your competitors will.
How are folks verifying and actually proving the ISPs are throttling traffic instead of the traffic being slow because of heavy use in the area? How do you prove something like this to a regulator?
Is anybody really happy that the FCC is asserting authority over the internet? I kind of preferred it being run by the IETF.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
You make a valid point. Assuming Comcast does comply with disclosing the details, what is the FCC going to do to change their practices? When the regulatory agency is completely impotent, what would motivate a company to comply?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
The article says nothing about the consequences. This is just another bullshit "warning" to Comcast with ZERO to back it up.
If I'm late with a child support payment, my license gets suspended. Meanwhile, if a corporate entity is late with some sort of government demand, jack shit happens. Fucking great.
Is there some reason why they aren't asking Time Warner, Cox, AT&T and others each about their practices? The best reason I can think of is that Comcast was caught sending the RSTs.
If the internet is to be free of this sort of tainted service, the protocols that the internet was built on need to be followed and implemented in good faith. Any deviations need to be made crystal clear so we consumers and businesses can make informed decisions about the tradeoffs. Comcast, I'm not just looking at you.
Really? So if you built a commercial network, you would want the FCC to dictate how you police your traffic and what QoS measures you implement? Sorry, but the less the goverment tells me how to run my business/network/enterprise, the better. If customers don't like it, they need to make it known via their wallets.
What license from the FCC does Comcast have? I didn't know I needed some kind of federal license to be an ISP.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just charge the heavy users more. Doy. Problem solved.
Since the FCC has made it clear that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against users based on the apps they choose to use, and they're already pissed at Comcast, now is the time to kick it up a notch and use the same argument to demand the opening of blocked web/e-mail ports and an invalidation of TOS terms that ban servers. Bandwidth is bandwidth, if I want to run a web server or my own e-mail server then no one should be able to stop me. The system of traffic management they claim to be moving to in the article should work just as well for users running servers. Of course, they falsely advertise it as unlimited usage at a certain bandwidth and, thus, shouldn't be allowed to throttle traffic in the first place but that's a whole other battle in the war against corrupt telecomm companies.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
You don't have to be a licensee to be liable for FCC violations. Penalties including seizure of equipment and fines are levied without trial.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Unless FCC suspends the operating license of Comcast until comcast changes its policy, nothing is going to change.
Unfortunately this FCC does not have even one ball to do that.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
A significant point that often gets overlooked in this issue is that Cable companies and phone companies are generally government granted, government enforced monopolies. For example I personally am under the Cablevision monopoly. I couldn't have Comcast as my ISP even if (for some twisted reason) I did want to do business with them.
State, county, and/or local governments handle the access rights - running the Cable and Phone lines on public telephone poles or underground on public land. A company cannot simply come in and compete against the local Cable or Telephone monopoly. Most people face at best a duopoly, the very limited competition between Cable broadband monopoly vs the Telephone broadband monopoly.
So long as the government is involved in supporting and enforcing these monopoly market conditions it is entirely appropriate for the government to be deeply involved in the market conditions and business behavior. If a company wants monopoly usage of the public infrastructure like this it is entirely appropriate for the government to impose conditions on that usage.
It is appropriate for the government to manage the usage of public infrastructure for the public benefit. When the government meddles in a market to enable or impose a monopoly in that market, it is appropriate and necessary for the government to artificially impose conditions to replace the natural competitive forces that ensure a healthy beneficial marketplace. To replace the natural competitive market forces that are excluded by the artificial government sponsored monopoly.
For example if someone wants to go into business as an ISP that filters out porn and other arbitrary "objectionable" content, then sure, they are welcome to do so. *I* wouldn't want to use that ISP, but some people would want to do so. And that competing alternative is fine, so long as the government isn't handing them a monopoly on the market. If they were one of the Cable companies, and the government was handing them an effective monopoly position on broadband for a region, or even a duopoly position vs the phone company, then that would be a huge problem.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Really? So if you built a commercial network, you would want the FCC to dictate how you police your traffic and what QoS measures you implement?
Right. If you build your private commercial network then I agree with you.
Just so long as you don't do it via a government granted, government enforced effective monopoly.
If you expect to do it based on privileged monopoly access building it on top of public telephone poles and public underground lines and other public infrastructure and other governmental benefits and governmental assistance....
well... if that were the case... well then you would be wrong.
If customers don't like it, they need to make it known via their wallets.
No. The government prohibits that. The government granted Cablevision monopoly market rights over my region. In other regions the government has granted Comcast monopoly market rights. I cannot do business with Comcast even if I wanted to. People in other regions cannot do business with Cablevision if that were their preference. The government grants and enforces these regional monopolies.
It is impossible to suggest the government should not meddle when the government is already involved. It is absurd to suggest "natural free market competition" is the solution to market problems when the force of government is prohibiting market competition.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.