Comcast Kisses-Up To Obama, Publicly Agrees On Net Neutrality

MojoKid writes Comcast is one of two companies to have earned Consumerist's "Worst Company in America" title on more than one occasion and it looks like they're lobbying for a third title. That is, unless there's another explanation as to how the cable giant can claim (with straight face) that it's in agreement with President Barack Obama for a free and open Internet. Comcast issued a statement of its own saying they back the exact same things, it just doesn't want to go the utility route. Comcast went on to list specific bullet points that they're supposedly in wholehearted agreement with, such as: Free and open Internet. We agree — and that is our practice. No blocking. We agree — and that is our practice. No throttling. We agree — and that is our practice. Increased transparency. We agree — and that is our practice. No paid prioritization. We agree — and that is our practice. Really? Comcast conveniently fails to address the giant elephant in the room whose name is Netflix. Earlier this year, Netflix begrudgingly inked a multi-year deal with Comcast in which the streaming service agreed to pay a toll to ensure faster delivery into the homes of Comcast subscribers, who prior to the deal had been complaining of frequent buffering and video degradation when watching content on Netflix. Comcast would undoubtedly argue that it's not a paid fast lane, but it's hard to see the deal as anything other than that.

Comments

Window Dressing.

[damn_registrars]

This is just Comcast trying to get some good PR before they force their agenda through. There is no purpose in companies kissing up to President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama, as he has consistently caved to the demands of conservatives and big businesses every time it was important to do otherwise during his administration.

Every. Single. Time.

Remember how he said he was going to stand up to insurance companies, and offer a single-payer option for health care? Remember how that was going to be his crowning achievement as president? Did we get any of that? No.

Remember how he said he was going to help the middle class instead of helping wall street fat cats? Remember how that worked out?

Comcast is just waiting for the attention to blow over. Eventually public attention will wane and then Comcast will kill off the net neutrality proposals and get their way.

Re:Window Dressing.

[Thanshin]

Of course they will, because corporations have infinite memory and infinite patience.

However, corporations just have a winning strategy for the present game. But this game can never be completely won until humanity extinguishes. Nobody wins forever.

It's time for a messiah of the fight of the productive force against the non-human corporations.

Not one who explains why it is a problem and how much worse it will get. We've had several of those in the last century. We now need one who actually finds a solution and has the charisma to put it in practice.

And I say charisma because, fortunately, power is still based on human beings. Thus, change will only come from someone who finds the solution and manages to convince enough people to apply it.

I wonder how much money do corporations spend in finding those guides to the next system and silencing them.

I suspect they spend nothing, because such person does not exist. Because enough people is too much people, and "too much people" is a very stupid beast.

Re:Window Dressing.

[penix1]

How can you reason that the ACA was caving in to republicans when none of them voted for it? The reason why we got the crap that we did was to get the moderates of his own party on board, which they almost failed to do anyway (see Nebraska). They never would have agreed to a single-payer system, and this was the best they could do to try to get coverage for everybody.

Where were you when they were drafting the act? The reason we got what we got was the Republicans were given an equal footing at the drafting table. There were 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans drafting it in the false belief that if they had a hand in making it they would support it. The reason it almost failed the Senate was totally Harry Reid's failure to take Mitch McConnell at his word to "make sure that President Obama was a one term president" and use the "nuclear option" to fix the filibuster rule at the start of that session. Even to this day it still hasn't been fixed.

The only reason the Republicans are fighting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the FULL title of the act) is their fear it will be as popular as Social Security and the fact that President Obama was backing it (at that stage I argue he would have backed anything that had a positive effect on the broken healthcare system we still have).

The insurance companies are against it because it requires 80% of the premiums be spent on healthcare while trying to eliminate the arbitrary denials. The doctors don't like it because it requires them to be more transparent and stop unnecessary tests that only line their pockets. It also cracks down on the waste, fraud and abuse by hospitals. So that is why they are against it.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans now have some form of healthcare that they could never get before.

Re:Executive Orders

[Thanshin]

Executive Orders will now come from Comcast.

We agree — and that is our practice.

Bullshit

[jsepeta]

Comcast throttled me. Fuck them.

Re:Private Links != Paid Priority

[QuietLagoon]

...Netflix traffic gets no special priority once it's on the internal network....

The problem with Netflix was not whether or not Netflix gets special priority once on Comcast's network.

.
The problem with Netflix was Comcast allowing its edge router to saturate, thus effectively throttling Netflix traffic until Netflix started paying Comcast for a private link.

Re:Private Links != Paid Priority

[Thanshin]

In the case of Comcast, Netflix traffic gets no special priority once it's on the internal network. The direct links simply lets them bypass the naturally occurring bottlenecks that occur at internet peering points.

In case you are truly sincere and just not intelligent enough to find the flaw in that reasoning, let me help you.

It's at "Naturally occurring". Analyse that part of the equation.

Thank you

[davidwr]

Thank you for having the guts to come here and say that. On behalf of the Slashdot community, I apologize for the rude tone of some of the replies.

Having said that, the replies above are essentially correct: It is part of Comcast's job to make sure its peering points don't get saturated under routine use. They owe that much to their customers (and of course they can pass that cost on to their customers).

Now, if the problem is at an upstream peering point that Comcast does not participate in, then I can understand that Comcast is not to blame. However, a company as big as Comcast should participate in peering points around the country, Comcast owes its customers that much. Every major network provider - including Netflix's provider - should be peering directly with Comcast* in the regions in which they and Comcast have a significant amount of traffic to exchange and in which both companies have a significant physical presence.

The same goes for ATT, Time-Warner, and the other major ISPs and network providers.

*If the peering at the peering point isn't, technically-speaking, direct, it should have the characteristics of a direct link from a customer-satisfaction point of view. That is, the connection is good enough that if you turned it into a direct-peering connection there wouldn't be much improvement.

Re:Private Links != Paid Priority

[sjames]

There's more than one way to prioritize traffic and I suspect you know it.

For example, you can consistently ignore an overloaded peering point that just happens to carry the traffic of a 3rd party you want to pressure into buying a private connection. Then you can refuse every reasonable offer of a cache server that would eliminate that overload even though it would result in a cost savings and greatly improve service to your own customers.

It amounts to the same as applying a policer to the port.

Bullshit.

[khasim]

Anyone who believes that buying private links into a providers network is the same as your traffic getting paid priority knows jack shit about network ops.

The Fallacy of Equivocation.

You've substituted the more specific network-jargon "priority" for the usage of "priority".

Once Netflix PAID Comcast then Comcast gave Netflix PRIORITY access to the Comcast network. The PRIORITY access means bypassing the choke point that Netflix was previously restricted to.

No one is saying that Comcast changed the QoS or priority of individual Netflix packets. But that is what you are denying.

Now I'm sure a bunch of people (who are not network engineers) are going to argue over the wording and philosophy as to whether or not buying paid links into a providers network constitutes priority or not. It's not.

Again, you are substituting a more specific network-jargon usage of "priority" that no one other than you is using.

And you are denying something that no one else is claiming.

That is the Fallacy of Equivocation.

The only difference that buying direct links in meant was that they got to skip the congestion in the peering points.

Which is what everyone, except you, is saying.

Once Netflix paid Comcast, Comcast users could suddenly get better access to Netflix.

But Comcast refused to do anything to address that congestion UNTIL NETFLIX PAID THEM.

Re:Private Links != Paid Priority

[NotSanguine]

Full Disclosure: I am a network ops engineer for Comcast.

Anyone who believes that buying private links into a providers network is the same as your traffic getting paid priority knows jack shit about network ops. In the case of Comcast, Netflix traffic gets no special priority once it's on the internal network. The direct links simply lets them bypass the naturally occurring bottlenecks that occur at internet peering points.

Now I'm sure a bunch of people (who are not network engineers) are going to argue over the wording and philosophy as to whether or not buying paid links into a providers network constitutes priority or not. It's not. In network operations, priority is a very specific concept. It means that you treat one class of traffic better than others, usually to the detriment of other classes of traffic. As an example, e911 voice traffic has the *highest* priority on the Comcast network.

Comcast does not treat Netflix traffic any better than anyone else's traffic. Nor is it treated any worse. It is forwarded as Best Effort within the Comcast network.

The only difference that buying direct links in meant was that they got to skip the congestion in the peering points. Comcast has alot more bandwidth internally and once traffic makes it into the network, congestion is not usually a problem (things do break, redundant links become saturated, etc. It's a big network, but in normal operation mode, congestion doesn't exist). What little prioritization we do has alot more to do with latency than with congestion (ie, your phone call is more important than your massive porn transfer, since voice is alot more sensitive to delay than bulk data transfer).

All of what you say is normal and reasonable, although I assume you don't honor QoS tags from VOIP traffic that originates outside your network. Which isn't a criticism, no one does. As for the paid links, that's not an issue, IMHO. I would point out that Comcast did refuse to install netflix CDN/caching servers, which would likely have resolved the issue much more cleanly for everyone. But the cable TV and content divisions must be "protected."

What's an issue for me (NB, I'm *not* a Comcast customer, you guys aren't even near me) is the surreptitious throttling of P2P and VPN traffic (and then lying about it), blocking port 25 and abusive (no servers, outrageous prices for static IPs if you guys even give those out at all on consumer links, I'm sure I could come up with a few more if I was a customer.) terms of service, not to mention the "retention" and upselling tortures your customer service reps put consumer-grade customers through.

At my previous employer we had a (not by choice -- we needed a redundant provider and you were it) Comcast Business link and, while the link was fairly stable and we got the speeds we paid for, anytime there was a problem (which wasn't often, in your defense) the tech support guys were worthless.

With the scripts and no (at least not exposed to me) ticketing reference numbers, no status updates and no follow up, it was awful.

Compared with the nine or ten other ISPs I dealt with globally, you guys were marginally better than Deutsche Telekom and that ain't saying much.

Sorry to dump all that on you, but if you want to talk about your organization, we should get it all out into the open. I didn't touch on the lobbying, the partnering with ALEC to block municipal broadband and the lawyers and the FUD from the front office and lobbyists. And don't even get me started on the huge subsidies provided to upgrade/build infrastructure that somehow never made it to very many truck rolls. So let's just let all that lie.

The truth is that, yes your networks are big and complex. Yes, there are areas where I can understand why you guys see some of the TOS as necessary to stop abuse, and yes I know that most folks (even here) are completely clueless about what it takes to run a large, heterogeneous, mu