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Comcast Finally Files Suit Against FCC Over Traffic Shaping
Following up on their threat last year to sue the FCC over sanctions imposed, Comcast has finally filed suit, stating that there are no statutes or regulations that support the FCC's authority to stop traffic shaping procedures. "First, let's recap: After months of proceedings, hearings, and investigations, the FCC concluded on August 1, 2008 that Comcast was discriminating against certain P2P applications using deep packet inspection techniques. These methods thwarted the ability of users to share video and other files via BitTorrent. 'Comcast was delaying subscribers' downloads and blocking their uploads,' declared then FCC Chair Kevin Martin. 'It was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or how small the file might be. Even worse, Comcast was hiding that fact by making [affected] users think there was a problem with their Internet connection or the application.'"
Because it is always the other party's fault, no matter what the problem is, when it started, or who started it.
Why was that modded down? I don't see how either party is involved, except that Bush appointed the FCC Chairman who shot down Comcast. If anything, wouldn't that be one of the (possibly few) good that he did?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Dear Comcast:
FUCK YOU.
- a former customer
I think he was trying to give an example of why gov regs are good. ;x
No, he was trying to pander to the left-leaning partisan audience with mod points. Why else would he aim his comment at Republicans? Are all Republicans opposed to all forms of regulation? Are all non-Republicans automatically in favor of them?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Except that isn't what comcast was caught doing. To use your freeway analogy, it's more like Comcast put up a big sign that said "Trucks use this exit" except instead of an exit, it was a cliff. Whenever they detected P2P traffic, they sent a reset packet to both sides of the connection, severing it completely before any significant amount of data could be sent.
No, he was trying to pander to the left-leaning partisan audience with mod points.
If he's a karma whore he's not very good at it; there are a LOT of Republicans here. I think what he was trying to point out was that the last administration was one that viewed the government as "always the problem", and face it, the Republicans deregulated, deregulated, and deregulated some more. Of course there were exceptions, but on the whole they're mostly for deregulation.
Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.
Free Martian Whores!
'Unless you re-write the laws to make cable a "utility" you can't govern the way they provide service.'
Actually, I believe the time has come to re-categorize internet providers as utilities. Most ISPs operate as either a monopoly or duopoly, have municipal districts and are considered to be an essential service for both business and home. All of these are common traits for a utility. It's time to start treating them as such.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
With the individual user's max bandwidth limited, there should be no need for this shaping, unless, of course, their network simply can't support what they are selling.
There is no standard-issue ISP or backbone provider in the world that is not oversold. That's how they make money: by estimating the margins they need to maintain. If they oversell too much, their service will suck and customers will flee. If they don't oversell enough, they'll be paying much more per-customer for their capacity than their competitors and won't be able to stay in business.
For example, suppose an ISP's historic utilization is 10% of their total customers' bandwidth if they were all to start downloading at once. If they buy enough bandwidth to support 5%, then downloads will take forever and everyone will hate it. If they go over 10%, though, they're throwing money down the drain. Suppose they paid for the full 100% of capacity. Customers won't faster speeds than if they bought 11%, because in either case they'd have enough to support actual demand.
Oblig. car analogy: roads are built for average flow, not maximum possible demand. Otherwise you'd have an 8-lane freeway direct to your cul-de-sac. If your hometown overbuilds roads, then they've wasted tax money that could've been spent on other stuff (or not collected in the first place (that was hard to type with a straight face)).
So all that is why we have traffic shaping. At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging. Traffic shaping seems like it would be bad, up until you're stuck using a connection that doesn't use it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure. It's the same reason that you don't find duplicate toll roads paralleling each other. This type of system naturally gravitates to a monopoly - whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices, after which "hello monopoly pricing!"
Partisan politics doesn't enter into it until you get one group of people who have as their religion "free market always bad" facing off against another group whose religion is "free market always good". The truth of the matter is that it varies from business to business, product to product. Adjust policy accordingly - if the system has high barriers to entry or increasing returns to scale, regulate it to level the playing field and/or protect consumers. If it has low barriers to entry and decreasing returns to scale, let competitors duke it out in the free market.
No, that's not fair. Most customers are unaware of these practices. Just because they let people opt-out when they get caught doesn't mean they're justified to any degree.
What Comcast was doing is not, and never has been, "traffic shaping."
What Comcast did was fraud, the equivalent of stealing the mail out of someone's mailbox or a Fedex/UPS employee walking off with your package.