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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
Comcast forges RST packets and intercept DNS requests using man in the middle attacks. This not only disrupts legitemate use of peer to peer technology but corporate VPN access for people working from home. If you or I were to do the same thing, we could be arrested and charged as felons under the DMCA and other "hacking" laws. Comcast is a criminal organization, its time for them to be held to account for the federal felonies that they are committing. Unfortunately, the limited liability of the America corporate system ensures that these felons will never serve jail time even in the unlikely event that something is done to stop their crimes.
In a perfect world the FCC will rip Comcast apart. Seriously. When Comcast is looking to buy a content provider like Vivendi or Disney, rather than investing money into infrastructure improvements, then something is entirely, completely off kilter and needs to be corrected. First, while I know that big companies are in business to make money, Comcast should not be in a financial situation to buy a company the size of Disney nor Vivendi. Second, and more importantly, if they are going to operate as a service provider, they should invest profits into ensuring they are able to be the best service provider they can. But, of course, they don't have to because they don't really compete with anyone so they can be a sub-par service provider who over charge for their service and make stupid amounts of money.
With luck, the FCC will get pissed and make an example of Comcast. I know it won't happen, but I can hope.
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.
... a Republican is a Democrat is a Politician ... they're all the same
Lack of government regulation can be bad. Some government regulation is good. Massive amounts of government regulation is bad.
who here disagrees?
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.
>It is not the ISP's place to make these decisions. Period. End of Story.
Actually it is, because it becomes the ISPs problem when my VPN, VOIP, gaming, etc time out because some guy doing bulk transfers is eating into all the bandwidth. Running a network involves priority and shaping. You may not even notice the shaping, because you can handle 150-200ms latencies with FTP, but the services I mentioned above will notice. Frankly, its networking 101.
>They have just made themselves complicit in committing innumerable crimes ranging from spreading virii to transmitting child porn to terroism.
I see youre as much as a lawyer as you are a network admin.
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.
Actually it is, because it becomes the ISPs problem when my VPN, VOIP, gaming, etc time out because some guy doing bulk transfers is eating into all the bandwidth. Running a network involves priority and shaping. You may not even notice the shaping, because you can handle 150-200ms latencies with FTP, but the services I mentioned above will notice. Frankly, its networking 101.
Okay, does Networking 101 involve knowing the difference between latency-sensitive and bandwidth-sensitive connections, and appropriately prioritizing them based on their actual usage, not a-priori decisions based on packet type?
E.g. VPN -- it may be latency sensitive and thus deserve priority if you're using the VPN for VNC or similar, or it may be as latency-insensitive and bandwidth-heavy as an ftp transfer, if what you're doing is an ftp transfer over VPN. In which case it causes as many problems for your VOIP users as any other file transfer, and giving it high priority will only make those issues worse.
VOIP on the other hand should always be low bandwidth (I don't know how low, but your land line works perfectly with a single 64kbs T0 virtual circuit), but latency sensitive, so giving it high priority should mean that its packets get through quickly, but don't actually delay anything else for any significant period of time.
Whereas streaming video is hypothetically latency sensitive, but very high bandwidth, so the solution there is not to prioritize the packets, but to have the client buffer up some data first, hopefully making it latency insensitive as long as the bandwidth stays fairly steady.
Basically what I'm proposing here is an idea from Operating Systems 101, where they have to solve a very similar problem. Some apps require responsiveness but don't need much cpu, others require lots of CPU time but don't really care how quickly they get scheduled for it as long as on average they get lots of cpu time. Scheduling the low-CPU apps first gives them the responsiveness they need, but by definition doesn't significantly hinder the cpu-intensive ones. But as soon as the app no longer fits that definition and starts eating up too much CPU, it gets bumped down in priority. That's the basic idea of the multi-level feedback queue. The best part is its dynamic and based on real usage -- you can even tell the OS what kind of app you are to get put into your preferred queue right away, but if that turns out to be a lie, you get shifted to the queue you belong in automagically.
Back when I took Networking 101, they never talked about any 'scheduler' ideas of any sophistication, and the QoS they did discuss was very simple and naive, seemingly from the basis that networking hardware wasn't up to the task. On the other hand they also talked about this kind of deep packet inspection as though it, too, was something that would be possible in the future but not yet.
So... Now that we can do the packet inspection, can we now associate the packets with a connection, and do prioritization based on actual usage, and actual utilization?
Which, by the way, is where the bullshit becomes really apparent wrt Comcast and how they actually do their shaping. They kill bittorrent et. al. at all times of day, regardless of actual network utilization at the time. Grandma Lolcat Lover causes more problems watching short videos during 'net prime time than a 20GB bittorrent at 5am. Comcast doesn't distinguish, because for them it's not about actually managing the network.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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.
You won't get any argument out of me that the Republicans fucked up and dug us a hole that will take the better part of a generation to dig out of. I'm just tired of left-leaning partisans wielding the GWB administration as a shield to deflect any and all criticism of the current government. Here's the typical conservation with one of them:
"I'm worried about the national deficit and how much it's going to rise under Obama."
"When George W. Bush took office he had a SURPLUS. Then he passed his TAX CUT FOR THE RICH and now we have a huge deficit. Republicans can't claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility any longer"
Umm, yeah, and how does that relate to my current concerns?
Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.
I don't have a problem with all regulation. It's clearly called for in some instances. I just don't think it's fair to blame the free market for the likes of Comcast when Comcast isn't operating under anything that remotely resembles a free market.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.