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

Re:Executive Orders

[Thanshin]

Executive Orders will now come from Comcast.

We agree — and that is our practice.

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.

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.