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Comcast Appeals FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling
Ian Lamont writes "Comcast has filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling that says the company can't delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles. A Comcast VP said the FCC ruling is 'legally inappropriate,' but said it will abide by the order during the appeal while moving forward with its plan to cap data transfers at 250 GB per month."
Watch them win and maintain the 250gb cap.
Comcast subscribers = butt pwnt.
Slowing or delaying p2p is one thing, but actively forging packets, for any reason, should be punished severely.
Forging reset packets does not equal "throttling", even if it does reduce the load on the network.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Hmm hmm It seems you have exceeded your 25 telephone calls per month, sir.
How can we do that?
Snort snort. tee hee.
How can we do that?
We're the TELEPHONE COMPANY, sir.
chortle chortle snort snort.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Switch from Comcast's cable to Dish Network / DirecTV, or a competing Cable company's product.
Switch from Comcast's internet to DSL, FIOS or even Satellite or Cellular internet provider.
Vote with your wallet....
Once enough subscribers cancel Comcast, maybe they'll finally pull their collective heads out of their collective asses...
Until then, they will continue to do whatever they want to try and maximize profit and to hell with their customers...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
From the article: "Comcast announced it would put a 250-gigabyte-per-month bandwidth cap on residential customers. Customers may get a warning if they go over the monthly cap, and after their first warning, Comcast will suspend their service for a year if they go over the cap a second time."
Lose you internet connect for a year! I do not have HD TV but how big are those HD movies that people are downloading? How many people have more then one computer on the internet in their home? Take a family of 4 (mom,dad, two teenagers) There are at least 3 computers in the house (4 most likely). If a movie is download by each computer, 250GB will be eaten up really fast. I know people with netflix who download 5-6 HD movies a week on one computer. I think they will run out of HD movies soon, but 250GB will be eaten up fast if one is downloading HD movies.
I didn't even go to the P2P stuff. This is a move to slow down P2P. Comcast should just come out and say it (if they haven't already). Maybe Comcast should work on improving the bandwidth of it's network instead of spending the time and money on restrictions. I really feel for those who have no other choice.
The delaying is BS. Even as a large downloader the 250gig limit doesn't bother me that much. Before it was the lack of transparency that bothered me so much. Saying unlimited and then cutting people off for some unknown arbitrary amount? No. Now I can at least choose to stay with a KNOWN limit or go somewhere else. I really hope they lose this appeal.
... inserting forged protocol packets ...
I consider content the TCP stream that delivers my (X)HTML, CSS, binary data, etc. How, exactly, is inserting additional data into the stream not modifying the content?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Mods, please wise up: Comcast is not a common carrier
(I'll probably be downmodded to hell for pointing out the truth here, but what the heck!)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm so sick of this argument. There is no valid alternative where a lot of people live. Where I live we are too far away for DSL. Satellite is *not* an option and FIOS isn't even a gleam in someone's eye. As for TV I don't watch TV anymore so that doesn't affect me.
I understand that and I'm sure the OP understands that - most folks know about the local monopolies. I don't have cable because I don't like the way ANY of the local providers operate. The only reason I have a cell phone is because someone else has purchased it - I refuse to get any cell phone under my own name because I think ALL the cell providers offer shitty terms in their horribly one sided contracts.
We're not talking about food, water, shelter, power, or even health care: this is just the internet. Need it for work? Fine, bend over and pay it.
I don't like the way corporate America works in many cases either (let's face, they can bitch and moan all they want but when it comes down to it, the laws favour them!), but if I don't need the service and I don't like the terms, I don't get it: regardless of how badly I want it. And you know what? I save money and I'm happier.
Want != Need.
Anyone that has read my comments for awhile will know that I tried to point this out months ago, and got flamed for it basically.
The problem with letting Comcast or any ISP that also provides content do anything to shape or filter traffic is that there is no oversight on how they will do this to their advantage. In this case, anything that limits your video usage/sharing in favor of using their video delivery systems is an unfair advantage. This is exactly why bundling 3 or more services together is a bad idea for the consumer... very bad idea.
If Comcast is allowed to mess with traffic on their ISP services, they WILL do so in a way that favors their other services and content. I don't believe there are any scientific studies on the probability of this happening, but you won't find many people (or rocks, walls, monkeys etc) that will tell you that it's unlikely that a big corporation will act unethically if given the chance to do so when nobody is watching.
As in the case of P2P forged packets, they will do whatever they can get away with. Comcast is, and has shown themselves to be an unethical company. period. They should not be trusted. Class actions suits should follow shortly.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
You can't drive that big-ass truck on my superhighway...
Only big-ass trucks carrying my brand of goods
can travel on my superhighway.
This ticket issued by: Comcast Traffic Police
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The thing that has me curious is why they haven't been taken to court over this.
It seems to me that forging packets is both a form of communication interception, and impersonation. Which should be landing them in hot water with a number of state and federal laws.
I think having volume caps and network neutrality is a good compromise. Once there are volume caps, however, there shouldn't be an preferential treatment to one kind of traffic or another. ISPs simply aren't in a position to decide which network traffic is important and which network traffic is not. For example, I'd like my VNC-over-SSH to be treated as just as important and real-time as someone's VoIP traffic.
This is what I thought of first, too.
Comcast has the FCC wrapped around the idea that it's -slowing- P2P traffic, that it's packet-shaping or throttling P2P. I would be totally fine if they just did that, it's their network, and it -should- be prioritizing VoIP, ICMP, interactive services, browsing, and file transfers (in that order) over P2P. What they are doing is -NOT- throttling, QoS, packetshaping, or whatever you want to call it, they are actively mangling the IP protocol to -drop- connections, making P2P actually unusable.
I'm a Cox customer, and they have a Sandvine appliance that does the same thing. I -cannot use bittorrent-. It's not that bittorrent is slow, or that they put it at a lower priority than my neighbor's porno, they -actually prevent it from working at all-.
The documents and PR I've seen from Comcast all seem to indicate that they are 'managing' the traffic, not 'mangling' it and the FCC has responded as if they were QoS'ing P2P.
Either the FCC doesn't understand what's really happening 'on the ground' here, or Comcast itself has a disconnect between Management and Network Management.*
*I worked somewhere once where there was a seriously overzealous network guy who would throttle services and block things at random. He always said he wasn't when I went to the boss and complained, but when I actually got access to the Packetshaper configs, I could see that he was in fact blocking and throttling services, except on his own machines and the boss'. I've been paranoid ever since.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
... delay the traffic of the highest bandwidth (ab)users. By doing this without regard to the content of the traffic, or its TCP port numbers, etc., then they are in a neutral position. How to do this delaying is another matter. They need to avoid focusing on peer-to-peer file sharing just because it happens to be the activity of the biggest users. As long as that is true, focusing on the actual bandwidth hogging will effectively slow down whatever usage is involved.
How to slow down users needs to do something other than forged RST packets. Aside from the legal issues, protocol developers will figure out ways to become RST immune. One simple way is to carry on as of there was no RST and see if a normal packet comes along within a certain time frame (a couple seconds). If not, then the RST is considered real. If there is a normal packet soon enough, then the RST is forged. Comcast is using this technique because it is NOT practical for them to selective drop individual packets in transit; RST forgery is a lower cost injection method. But if they continue this method, geeks will figure out ways around it (plural ... there's more than one way to do this).
Ultimately they will have to make it dynamically adjust the bandwidth rate on the customer attachment equipment. If a customer bursts traffic at high rates too much, gradually lower their bandwidth burst rate limit until it reaches the level where continuous traffic solidly for a month equals 250GB.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The download cap is a poorly disguised attempt to head-off video downloads via the internet.
And I'm referring to the legal ones - like iTunes+Apple TV and Netflix's Roku player.
You can get video and voice from many other companies. These services require bandwidth. Buy these services from companies other than your cable company, and you will find yourself potentially hitting the cap. Buy these services from the cable company (delivered digitally) and the caps disappear.
This is a classic case of monopoly abuse.
-ted
It is a BAD example of government OVER regulation! In most cases, its a LACK of stronger regulation that is the problem! Many cities would love 2 cable companies and probably give them incentives!
Public resources are owned by government which has a "monopoly" on them. The error I often see is that some think government is a form of corporation; it can not have any monopoly because it represents all citizens (government corruption is off topic; its OUR fault if we become corporatist, etc.)
In my area the local governments created a NGO with a board appointed by the cities it serves and it manages the public lands in regard to communications use by private orgs. This board isn't great; however, it is generally the best thing we can do in our area. Problem is the cable and phone companies are too powerful for our 10 cities and nobody will MOVE IN to compete without massive government welfare (which the existing monopolies initially HAD.) Every legal fight is a loss for us and even if the 10 cities directly used their relatively "vast" funds it quite likely would still loose in the end (they just lobby the state when at risk.)
Government could run fibre and make a NGO to manage ISPs sharing the line and could run that line non-profit or even at a loss; unlike the PHONE corp which is required by law to share its lines and does a poor job of it for obvious reasons. This is next logical step since a few fibre lines over public land is nearly the same monopoly situation and consumers would have to subsidize the waste of many extra lines (we already subsidized all the phone/cable/water/gas lines...)
My downtown roads are a mess; why? because corps keep changing around their lines running under the roads and get permits to dig it all up. Yes, I agree that the city needs to force them to all do their changes together at a more REGULATED time. But if we extend that to non-profit shared services under our roads... like we have for water...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What? That's less than an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude. Well within slashdot's desired accuracy.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Or better yet file a case in court asking it to throttle your payments to comcast: If comcast throttles your connection speed to a lower level for 20 mins, you can throttle your payment to a lower rate calculated exclusively by you for 20 mins. (say 8Mbps DSL costs $100 a month unlimited; that works out to 2 cents a minute. If the speed drops down to 15Kbps for 20 mins each day for 30 days it amounts to 8/100*0.0015*(600).
State to small-claims court that comcast is violating a contract by "damaging" goods: so you want to pay only for correctly arrived goods. Comcast's high-powered lawyers can't do shit here.
Get a court order allowing you not to pay for damaged goods: then apply your own definition of damaged goods and send off a payment you calculate along with the court order: If comcast refuses to accept the same, they are in violation of a court order: in which case you can "demand" they fulfill their contract. If they accept, then you have set a precedent.
Either way you win.
Use ingenuity instead of anger: corporates do the same. Logical, emotionless, greedy: be like them. Play them at their own game with a home advantage=Small claims court.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer