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Comcast Hit With FCC Complaint Over Net Neutrality Violations (streamingmedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Non-profit public interest group Public Knowledge has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission regarding Comcast's Stream TV service. The complaint says that Comcast excludes Stream TV traffic from its own data cap, which is both a violation of its merger agreement and counter to the FCC's Open Internet rules. Stream TV is a $15 per month offering for Xfinity internet customers. It includes local channels, some basic cable, HBO, and the use of a cloud DVR. Most content is streamed over the home network. Public Knowledge's senior staff attorney, John Bergmayer says, "Comcast's actions could result in fewer online video choices for viewers nationwide, while increasing its dominance as a video gatekeeper. If its behavior persists, prices will go up, the number of choices will go down, creators will have a harder time reaching an audience, and viewers will have a harder time accessing diverse and independent programming."
As long as competitor content isn't slowed down to make your content more attractive, it seams reasonable to me to put caps on out of network usage, but no caps on usage from servers which are wholly owned by the ISP.
Bzzzzt. Wrong. Sorry. That's not the correct answer. This is almost exactly the same thing as that offer from Sprint to allow streaming videos from certain providers not to count against data usage. This is precisely what net neutrality is meant to guard against.. preferential treatment of any data. They need to uncap it all, or it all counts against cap.
If there are caps on their servers, but not on yours, then their servers are by definition slowed down. They can transfer a limited amount of data in a fixed set of time, yours can transfer an unlimited amount in the same time. Thus, theirs are slowed.
Erm, the municipalities are the ones who gave the cable and phone companies monopolies in the first place. Why are you trying to solve a government-created problem with more government control? Europe and Asia have better Internet than the U.S. not because of more government control, but because they were smart enough to regulate their Internet in a way which creates more competition.
The only way to get competition is to prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes. This is already done for natural gas and electricity in in most areas. One company owns and maintains your gas lines, but you can choose from hundreds if not thousands of gas providers. The company who owns the pipes usually also sells gas, but only through a subsidiary (in my area, that's the difference between The Gas Company and Sempra Energy), and they're required to allow other gas providers to send gas through their pipes for the same transport fee they charge their subsidiary.
Of course if you choose to buy gas from company ABC, the methane atoms that come into your house don't all come from company ABC. They all get mixed together in the pipeline. But as long as you use x cubic feet of gas, and company ABC inserts x cubit feet of gas into the system on your behalf, the numbers all balance out.
We tried a similar thing with DSL for a while - forcing local phone companies to lease their lines to other DSL providers for the same price as their own DSL service. It worked on the pricing side. What sank it was (at least in my area) Verizon gave priority to fixing physical line problems when the line used their DSL service. Getting them to fix a line problem when using a 3rd party DSL service was like pulling teeth - they'd keep blaming the DSL company for the problem. In the face of that kind of malfeasance, the only solution is to entirely prohibit the company who owns the pipe from selling what's sent through the pipes.
Quick tip for those trying to argue against this. You can't simply argue "Net neutrality good!" There's a real lowered economic cost with the way Comcast delivers these services - they locally host the servers which contain the streaming data, so the data doesn't have to get to them over the Internet. Consequently it doesn't cost them any bandwidth so they can provide it to you at lower cost. And since the data never has to travel over the Internet to get to them, net neutrality doesn't really apply.
The way you have to argue against this is that they're mingling the accounting between two different operations. Unless they can prove the service costs them exactly $15/mo per user or less (minus their normal profit margin), they're essentially taking money from other cable subscribers to subsidize this service. That should be pretty easy to prove given that HBO Now just by itself is $15/mo. Thus they're pricing it below their own cost, which given the local monopoly they hold is illegal. Add in the fact that they initially refused to accept the local servers Netflix offered to them for free precisely to eliminate the bandwidth charges, and you have a slam dunk of an anti-trust case.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the company which owns the pipes is also selling stuff transported through those pipes. That gives them an unfair advantage over competing companies trying to sell stuff transported through their pipes. The solution is to prohibit the company who owns the pipes from selling anything which is sent through it. Break the company up into two separate entities - a pipe maintenance company and a pipe content company.