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RCN P2P Settlement Is Not Even a Slap On the Wrist
Ars covers the settlement of the RCN P2P throttling class-action lawsuit, which lets the company walk away without admitting guilt, without paying affected users, and without any meaningful restraint on their network management practices. "[The] settlement is due to be finalized on June 4. ... The case has largely flown under the radar. Yesterday, a notice ... was issued that alerted RCN customers to the settlement, and one Ars reader was aghast at the terms. Those terms provide nothing for users affected by RCN's practices. Instead, they require the cable company to change its network management practices. These changes are in two parts. ... These cessation periods would be retroactive. ... A moment's math will tell you that, when the settlement is finally approved, one cessation period will already have ended and the other will be ending soon. Once both cessation periods are over, RCN is allowed to implement whatever throttling regime it wants. Given that a federal court has just removed the FCC's authority to regulate network management, RCN appears to have carte blanche to single out BitTorrent and other P2P traffic for special throttling attention after November 1, 2010."
Let's see: I can switch to Comcast, or I can stay with RCN. Perhaps you're fortunate enough to have limitless options for broadband providers, but some of us would prefer the protection of government regulation when our choices (e.g., between one of two providers with a demonstrated tendency to screw with our service) are limited.
Even if a bunch of people don't like it, the two parties in the case obviously came to this conclusion. I also have to admit that if it is their service they can do whatever they well please with it, obviously they need to state that when you buy the service, which I'm sure they will now. I hate the fact ISP's don't have enough competition as the next person, my only hope is that if a company does begin throttling demand for another service will increase, as demand increases... supply increases in the form of another ISP. I know personally I've been stuck with one cable company for a long time, but just recently recieved a letter form a local phone coop asking if they can lay fiber to my house for internet and tv service. Hell yes I said... it's just going to take time.. but I have faith a free market system will work it out.
RCN users may not have another ship to jump to.
Unless regular citizens build their own wireless network for P2P or Google gets into the ISP business, they (and the rest of us later) are screwed.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
RCN used QoS techniques on their network, which is expected. They weren't filtering BT or P2P per se. I'm not completely sure what this is in regards to, but I've never seen them as the big bad that Comcast was.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Horrible service that goes out frequently. Useless phone customer service. Refusal to issue refunds for non-functional service.
I'll never ever ever use them, ever again.
I didn't even know they were so non-net-neutral, but it doesn't really surprise me.
The Supreme Court did not take away any FCC authority to regulate network management; the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC never had such authority in the first place. In fact, the judges specifically asked the FCC where that authority came from but the FCC has no answer.
Think about it. If everyone just flat out boycotted doing anything for even a week. If an entire nation stopped going to work, if they just ate whatever was in their fridge and spent time taking walks, talking with their friends, and just flat out relaxing, what the hell could corporations do besides finally realize they can't bend us over and rape us?
The mere notion of not checking the internet, not watching TV, and not buying corporate crap on a daily basis. That's what's keeping us from having any control. Maybe a small fraction of the country elects to avoid every corrupt corporation like the plague. Maybe. Maybe a large percent of the population would avoid these corrupt corporations if they had a choice. What remain is that enough people don't give a shit about anything except for living their consumerist lives. So long as that >50% of the population continues to let corporations do whatever they want out of sheer willful ignorance ("I'd do something if I could, but in truth I'd never dream of selling my ipod, let alone not buying a Big Mac every week!"), corporation will continue to do whatever they want. So long as it's profitable to the congress folk, those corporations will get away with bloody murder.
I just don't know how much more I can take before I lose it.
And some of us are more interested in what cand be done to improve our choices rather than agree to government regulation that will guarantee that our choices will be limited forevermore.
I am not familiar with the US market, but will tell you what it's like in the UK.
One of my previous ISPs decided to introduce throttling on different services using deep packet inspection to implement it. Their priority was for websites (port 80) and POP3 email. Everything else was throttled, in particular P2P services, and VoIP like Skype. However, by strange coincidence, the ISPs own VoIP service was NOT being throttled.
As the company had to issue new terms of service you had to agree to because of the throttling, I left without penalty, and actually told them they were a bunch of shysters who were more interested in saving money that commissioning more capacity (they actually oversold the network and could not keep up). If you can, the only way to teach these companies is to leave them.
Sure, the ISP has grown, but that's on the backs of new users who don't know any better, and would think that different internet services were just that slow all the time.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Won't someone think of the Lawyers? Without Class Actions like this they would likely be severely under paid by millions of dollars.
Indeed. Customers have plenty of alternatives. They could invest billions of dollars to setup their own infrastructure or switch to IP by carrier pigeon. If you can't succeed at it without help from the government you are clearly a spoiled little baby with no more right to communicate than a spineless worm.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
And how exactly are you planning on stopping corruption? Send in a good person who pretends to be corrupt and hope they don't get actually corrupted when offered millions to keep things the same?
Chicago has an option. Clearwire has 4G wireless internet that covers all of RCN and Comcast areas. I'm not sure how good it is, but since I am living in a building that is either RCN or DSL I might consider it.
All snide, childish remarks aside...
Should we ban all cars because they are all capable of speeding-and many do? I mean, sure there are legal users, but when someone misuses something we should punish the good folks too! All in the name of the economic good; who cares about that FOSS stuff anyway?
As a current RCN customer for 3 years now, I must say their service has been way better than other Chicago area providers I have tried in the past.
With that said, as long as they aren't dropping protocols on purpose or QOSing them to intolerable rates, I don't mind. In my 3 years of service I have never had an issue with P2P on RCN's network. Things like VOIP, HTTPS, HTTP, POP3/IMAP, SSH, etc are way more important than P2P will ever be in terms of traffic priority. Torrents, legal or otherwise, finish when they finish, no big deal. Services like VOIP don't have that luxury of dropping lots of packets.
If you don't like it get Comcast, DSL, or Clearwire.
The courts sided against the FCC, so what laws or TOS did RCN violate?
I am not disagreeing that Washington is owned by the lobbyists.
I am not disagreeing that their is too little competition in the broadband industry.
But when the FCC lost I am surprised RCN didn't tell opposing council to f-off.
I am on RCN - and I dont really have a huge need to download 4GB files from bit torrent or similar services. So in a way - I am very happy with the limitations put by RCN, cos I know such downloading just messes up my experience. So - if you do plan to download huge files - pay a bit more (or a lot more). If fat people can pay for two tickets on SWA, there is no need to charge the same for people who download 25GB a month and other who download 250GB. Maybe the P2P enthusiasts can pay for the reduced download speeds I have to bear when am downloading 80MB files!
Bandwidth is a limited resource - and it has to be treated as such. While net neutrality is great in theory, most pipes are not public roads - they are tollways. And on tollways, you pay according to how you use it.
If a corporate puppet doesn't toe the line with the lobbyists they could always get their colleagues to trump up charges worthy of impeachment.
I have no idea why you think that. Who is better? In Chicago, it would be tough to beat them.
Paying based on how much you use does not break net neutrality. If a an ISP wanted to charge me $X/month + $1.50/GB after the first Y GB (maybe Y=0, even), that would be fine. The problem is that they are charging $40+/month for "unlimited" internet which is really limited an arbitrary ways unknown to the user.
That is not necessarily true.
Smaller companies starting out sometimes get forced out of the business by cut throat practices, forced buyouts, etc.
Usually the company that does the "Right" thing ends up on the short end of profits and gets forced out.
Now if a company is both good and profitable that just means they are vastly superior to their competitors.
They could invest billions of dollars to setup their own infrastructure or switch to IP by carrier pigeon.
I expect that you will find out pretty quickly that you will want special bittorrent pigeons to separate the traffic from the ones carrying email and web. :)
it doesn't get any better even with more options, Verizon? ATT? They're all in it....
Actually, Chicago has clearwire 4G, AT&T DSL, comcast/RCN, AT&T U-Verse, I believe verizon has a cellular package, and of course Dish.
You're comparing the U. S. of A to EUROPE? You must be one of them there Socialists.
Signed,
Mainstream America
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
That's a good point someone made after the SEC announced its investigation of Goldman Sachs recently, that what Goldman did is such a small thing and probably not illegal compared to the obviously illegal scams that the SEC actively chose to ignore. The point was more regulation will solve nothing, we already have regulations that cover most of the bad stuff; if anything we should scale back the regulation to the older, common law method, which was: let people know what you are selling them. If people know what they are buying and they buy it anyway, that is their problem; but if you are deceiving them it your fault.
In this case it isn't a problem of government regulation either, it's a problem of no options: I don't care if Comcast blocks every port (including 80), as long as I have another provider to choose from. There is serious anti-competitive behavior going on here, and it's based on collusion with the government. THAT is a bigger problem than net neutrality, because without it, net neutrality wouldn't be an issue.
Qxe4
I don't even have 2 choices. It's comcast or dialup and there aren't even sub-40 year old telephone lines in this apartment complex.
This whole RCN thing is just Comcast deja vu. I wish Gates would set up billions in some non-profit for shit like this and not just malaria (yea, malaria is important, so is broadband and he's an American ffs; we already give out more foreign aid than anyone else without him).
No; send in guns. (Yes, it really only took 9 seconds to type that, Slashdot!)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
How, exactly, do you think that government regulation leads to anti-competitive behavior?
When you speed your principle activity is moving form point A to point B, the way many do it does not obeying the law, but speeding is not often the intended ends. If speeding itself were the goal of most drivers, still not sure I'd be all for outlawing driving, but I'd be for a massively higher gas tax.
How about a community internet coop? Set up kind of like the farm or financial coops?
You are an owner of the coop and your monthly fee is for the maintenance of the system?
If we all stopped paying taxes, the Corporations would go broke . . .
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
I'm not sure if you are asking a rhetorical question there, but as I mentioned in my previous post, government regulation leads to anti-competitive behavior by collusion between government and industry. Basically, if you own a company, you get your representative to write the law in a way that subtly favors your particular company. In this case, it isn't subtle at all: some municipals have very specific regulations prohibiting competition among cable/internet providers.
The problem gets worse the more complicated the regulations are, because the fewer people understand the regulations, the easier it is to subtly sneak something in to the law. Which is why it is important to have simple, clear regulations.
Qxe4
One big reason the US internet providers are overpriced and suck-ass is because our government mostly allows them to monopolize on a per infrastructure basis. Their reason being that "if we pay to install it, we should milk it for all its worth without fear of competition". This doesn't foster competition with better providers, it just allows them to do whatever they damn please. Until that changes, none of the providers have much to fear; since you only have a handful of providers that monopolize their own infrastructures without fear of competition, they make the rules that favor their shareholders.
If Comcast (or whatever ISP) had to compete on the same lines (not including DSL), they would have actual competition with things that matter most to the consumers like service and price. And even if they lease out the infrastructures to other providers, they still have control of it, meaning they can make it prohibitively expensive for other competitors to have any way to compete with them in a somewhat fair manner.
It's all about the bottom line. I'm all for capitalism, but only in a truly free market. Right now that's not the case.
what Goldman did is such a small thing
Not really. Think of it as a sample charge - Goldman Sachs was selling mortgage securities on a huge scale whilst simultaneously betting that the housing market would collapse using CDOs. They made an absolute fortune from the collapse of house prices and the ensuing global recession, and it was something they helped to create in the first place. Meanwhile, more honest competitors like Bear Sterns that actually believed in what they were selling went under. This investigation is just what the SEC thinks it can prove right now.
There's also some evidence that it isn't the first time Goldman has done such a thing, and it probably won't be the last. For example, one of the more interesting reactions to the investigation was a drop in metal and other commodity prices - Goldman Sachs doesn't consume them, but it's heavily involved in these market, and there's a certain amount of suspicion that there might have been artificial bubbles in the markets that it benefited from.
hmmm...
I've been with RCN for years and I can't say I have any problems with my torrent throughput, but then again, I never use the default ports. I'm not saying that I'm an expert, but I do know that my own non-scientific comparative testing showed a major throughput difference between using the default BT ports and a randomly selected port in the higher range.
If someone can prove me wrong, or explain why I am - I am certainly open to learning.
It wasn't a rhetorical question, so thanks for answering. I actually found a Cato piece from 1984 about local government sponsored cable monopoly. Their argument was that there were two places that didn't regulate and they got very little in return. i.e. Pheonix didn't regulate and it got two cable providers (yay, just like everyone else!). I think we now have a competitive market in cable/satellite and it's just not so good. Even in NYC where costs aren't that large for installing cable/fiber/satellite options, prices are through the roof and there is lots of players.
Given that a federal court has just removed the FCC's authority to regulate network management,
Gah! That is not what happened!
The supreme court upheld their authority to regulate network management. The problem was that the FCC ">didn't make their network neutrality principles as official rules. They didn't follow their own paperwork, so they didn't have the power to sue over it.
Here's how the financial industry works: smart people rip off less smart people by making the terms so complicated the other party can't understand them. In the case brought by the SEC against Goldman, Goldman wasn't even making the deal themselves, they were helping to arrange a deal between two other large financial groups. They weren't exactly ripping off widow retirement funds, the large financial groups should have known better.
Bear Sterns was playing the same game, they just weren't as smart as they thought they were and ended up being the ones who got ripped off. This wasn't fraud, they knew the terms of the financial devices they bought, they just weren't smart enough to understand the implications.
If you want to avoid that fate, learn the lesson of Bear Sterns: never enter in a financial agreement that you don't understand the upside, the downside, and the probability associated with each. Because there are 'financial planners' who are actually just salesmen looking to rip off the average citizen.
If you think Bear Sterns was actually more honest than Goldman Sachs, you are naive.
Qxe4
Interesting information. It will be interesting to see how it plays out with internet.
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