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Comcast Customers Urged To Opt-Out of Settlement
funchords writes "As a settlement to the class-action lawsuits over Comcast's blocking of users' Internet traffic, Comcast stands to pay 'up to' $16.00 to every subscriber who makes a claim at their settlement website and declares, under penalty of perjury, that their online activity was for a lawful purpose consistent with applicable copyright and other laws. Robb Topolski, the veteran networking engineer who kicked off the case when he discovered the blocking back in 2007, says that the proposed settlement doesn't make sense, especially after the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled this month that the US Federal Communications Commission didn't have the authority to enforce its Net neutrality principles on Comcast. 'You paid about $50 a month for the service, and the amount that Comcast stands to return is up to about 50c per month for each month that it blocked traffic,' he wrote. 'If that tiny amount of money is compensation, then there is no penalty to Comcast for interfering with its customers, for failing to disclose it, for repeatedly lying about it, and for taking so long to stop it.' The Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in late 2007, each independently confirmed Topolski's reports that Comcast was blocking BitTorrent and some other traffic without telling its customers. Comcast first denied interfering with traffic, then finally said it throttled some applications only during times of peak congestion. However, studies from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany eventually proved that Comcast slowed BitTorrent traffic around the clock."
Oh Luxury!! I do not have that option if I want high speed internet.
If only that were possible where I live.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
So what is Comcast geting off so easy?
Laws are webs that catch little bugs and let the big ones slip through.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Oh Luxury!! I do not have that option if I want high speed internet.
You can't eat your cake and have it too. Either Comcast pisses you off enough that you don't sign up with them (and yes, you go without high speed net access) or their behavior doesn't bother you enough to prevent you from entering a contract with them. Sometimes standing by what you believe in means doing without something you want.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
WTF? So basically, you are implying that I move out from where I live? High speed internet is absolute necessity for me for the work I do.
but $16/per isn't exactly a hefty penalty.. so if that's "all they had to pay" vs building out their infrastructure.. they will continue to take the lawsuits. $16 settlement is comcast taking their subscribers out to lunch. once. ...look at it this way. how many people have to die/get injured before an auto manufacturer issues a recall? it's cheaper for them to pay settlement(s) than recall X number of cars. they won't fix the problem until the cost of the lawsuits exceeds the cost of a recall.
they should have been forced to refund all the subscription fees they collected while they were throttling.
This makes sense when you actually have an open market with competition.
Let's follow your logic, "Well if you don't like it, don't use it". I need high speed internet to work. "Well if you don't like it find a new job." I have the job I have to afford my mortgage. "Well if you don't like it, move."
So I would actually need to abandon my mortgage and find a new career because a cable company has a state approved service monopoly in the area but isn't treated like the public service utility it should be in order to garner those protections. It's a whole lot deeper than "Well if you don't like it, don't use it." in this day and age.
Well, I would probably just file a charge of trespassing, breaking and entering, vandalism or whatever it's called.
Same as in this case, when it should be possible to file a charge of fraud. Or a complaint over truth-in-advertising laws. The self-regulating nature of free markets depends on accurate information propagation. The muddier information gets the greater the power disequilibrium, and the less consumer demands are met.
Yeah, I know, "good luck with that".
That is the point. If you accept the settlement, and the $16, you let them off the hook...
That is the way it is in America today. Corporate malfeasance against the individual: penalty is paying A SINGLE PENNY on the dollar. Corporations claiming malfeasance by the individual (Capitol/RIAA vs Thomas) penalty is ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS on the penny!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
So the settlement doesn't make Comcast pay out enough money, so everybody should opt out, so Comcast gets to pay nothing?
Breakfast served all day!
I'm a bandwidth leech.
I get games from steam. I watch netflix movies. I use xbox live. I watch hulu. I surf the web and use other various high bandwidth applications.
Those are all high bandwidth services which saturate my Internet connection.
I usually am online at least 12 hours a day.
I pay for Internet access, I pay for those services. I don't see the problem.
The problem comcast sees is that I download several GB per day and my content doesn't come from them. I use the access I pay for.
I prefer my content come from elsewhere. Comcast's conflict of interest isn't being taken seriously.
Why should I be throttled for legally consuming content?
They're using their grammar skills there.
It sounds like you don't have the option for high speed Internet anyway, then.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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Why should I be throttled for legally consuming content?
Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it. Ignoring the particular facts of this case - Comcast's underhanded methods and deception - would it really be unfair to say, for example, that those people that use the most bandwidth have their speed capped when other people want to use that bandwidth? Let's briefly look at the alternatives:
- The bandwidth is divided equally between all subscribers at all times, meaning that if Lucy Lightuser and Henry Heavyuser are online at the same time Lucy gets the same amount of bandwidth as Henry. This seems fair if you analyze it only over the times when both of them are trying to use the internet, but it doesn't take into account the fact that one Henry can disrupt the internet use for a lot of Lucys; if Henry spends all day downloading media, for example, then every Lucy that goes online will have her download speed reduced because Henry is always using as much as possible. This means that the ISP has to provide extra headroom to allow for Henry, headroom that the large number of Lucys are effectively subsidizing.
- The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
So if "naive-sharing" is unfair and speed guarantees are prohibitively expensive, what can we do?
A rule that would seem fair to me would be that when a number of people are competing for the same bandwidth, the amount that each of them gets should be inversely proportional to the amount of data they have already transferred that day/week; i.e. if you use your internet twice as much as me then when we are both trying to use the internet, and there is not enough bandwidth to serve both of us fully, I would have access to 2/3 of the contended bandwidth while you would be restricted to 1/3. In this case the heavy users and light users both get a fair deal: the heavy user gets greater total transfer, while the light users get faster connections when they use them. No one subsidizes anyone else.
In order to encourage heavy users to download things when it causes less congestion you could also discount off-peak usage, so that, for example, every 2MB transferred on a home connection before 6PM would count as 1MB for the purposes of bandwidth apportionment.
A system like that would allow a heavy user like yourself to download as much as you want, on the condition that if someone who only rarely uses the internet wants to download something they get priority.
All your points are totally valid and seem to be well thought out. The issue for "leeches" like DragonTHC (and myself-- I do my fair share of Netflix, XBox live, and web dev work at all hours of the day and -- suprise -- I don't even HAVE a torrent client installed on my gear) is that what Comcast is selling takes none of that into account.
Anyone here could have predicted that the asymmetrical use of internet by many customers with different needs would result in less than optimal service for everyone-- and the solution to mysteriously throttle usage and inject "man-in-the-middle" attacks to disconnect the "bad" customers is a bad call on Comcast's part.
Tiered pricing? I would pay for that. Being treated like a criminal for eating all I can eat at the ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET is a breach of contract.
You are not the only one, I am a bandwidth leech and I agree that there should be limitations on my usage. What I disagree with though is that I am limited without being informed that it will happen. I also disagree with being lied to about it, and I also disagree with communications protocols being abused to limit me.
If they want to limit me, they need to make me aware that I will be limited for certain usages. They need to be precise and stick to their word about how and when, so that I as a consumer can choose which package will suit me and my usage needs. They need to stop selling "unlimited" packages, and then claiming I am overusing it. They need to limit my usage through the usage of correct protocol, and they need to be honest about it.
We are not greedy, we are simply using what we have paid for, and what we have been promised.
Who need's speling and grammar?
Actually, quite often, it is not. And dialup is just fine for LOLCAT viewing, if that's really your thing.
On the other hand, if your job requires that you be able to move data at a reasonable rate, you have to have high speed. And in a lot of areas, that's Comcast, Comcast, or Comcast.
Let's quit with the "free market" garbage here. If we really had a free market, where Comcast was but one of many high speed providers in most areas (and at least some of the providers weren't pulling stunts like this), you'd have a point. As it is, a good lot of us don't.
Now, if we can go back to required line sharing, and actually enforce that with some teeth, so that there is real competition, I'm all for it. But that's not the case now. Generally, one or at most two providers have a monopoly of a given area.
The reason that telephone companies are so heavily regulated is that they provide a critical infrastructure service and generally are effectively local monopolies. The telephone company cannot, for example, block or degrade calls to the local public utility commission that accepts complaints about it. It must carry all traffic equally, except that it may prioritize traffic to emergency numbers.
Ironically, with the proliferation of cellular services, regular old telephone companies have more competition and less monopoly power than they used to, while ISPs are often in that very position they used to occupy. There's no reason that the ISPs should not be subject to the same types of rules-no blocking, no deliberately prioritizing stuff you want people to use or degrading the stuff you'd rather they not. Dumb pipe only-you sell people the pipe to put through it what they will, and if you need to upgrade your system to meet newer demands, then get to building.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Let's throw out your entire bullshit argument and replace it with one that makes sense:
How about companies don't over sell their lines? False advertising is illegal. The end. There isn't a "debate" here. If you pay for XkB/s then god damnit you should get X kB/s. PERIOD.
Well, I suppose blindly ignoring what I wrote and then being abusive is one way of debating. Let's try a different one.
In my original post I wrote:
The other alternative would be for the ISP to provide enough total bandwidth for every subscriber to use their maximum allowance all at once. This is fair - Lucy is no longer paying for Henry's use; she can even get a special light-user package if she wants - and it's actually already available. The downside is the price; because a guarantee of constant top speed means no (or little) over-selling is possible, a guaranteed 2MB connection starts at about $350/month.
Let me expand on this a little. There's almost nothing in the world that can cope with everyone using it maximally at the same time; everything is oversold. We all pay taxes to build the roads, but we can't all drive on them at once - they'd get full. Everyone with an airline ticket paid, but if they all turn up they can't all get on. Municipal transport, parks, museums, art galleries - all of these are funded, at least in part, through taxation, but if everyone who had paid to build them tried to use them at once they would find they couldn't. Heck, even grocery stores and supermarkets are oversold: the land they are built on, the roads that run to them, the infrastructure that lets them run - all these thing were, at some point, sold by the state, which means that everyone paid toward building the store. But can everyone buy things at once? Of course not.
Overselling is an eminently sensible economic plan. The alternative is to build an enormous amount of unnecessary capacity, wasting everyone's money: we could build enough roads for everyone to use them maximally, but then the Pan-American highway would have to be the width of Washington State, and that's just stupid. Similarly we could give everyone a dedicated, 100% guaranteed high speed line straight to their home, no overselling - but it would mean putting in an enormous amount of capacity that would just sit dormant. And putting in that extra, largely unnecessary capacity is expensive, which is why it costs five times as much to get a dedicated line as a shared, over-sold one.
False advertising is an entirely separate matter which, as I tried to indicate, I have deliberately not dealt with. Clearly ISPs should be upfront about what they're selling. But given the impossibility of building a system that cannot possibly be saturated a 100% guaranteed speed is not realistic.
I hope that's cleared things up. If you have anything you want to actually disagree with rather than just calling my argument "bullshit" I'd be more than happy to respond.
One more thing: can I suggest that you stop saying things like "The end" and "PERIOD"? Clearly there is a debate here; what's more, I think you'll find that there almost always is a debate about pretty much everything - rational, intelligent people can legitimately disagree and the discussion is made easier if you don't resort to silliness.