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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.
Realistically, there's only one way to get competition in broadband, and that's with municipal fiber, owned by the community, maintained through fees charged to the ISPs that lease it to service homes and businesses. The profit motive gets removed from the picture when it comes to the actual line costs and maintenance, which means maintenance is likely to actually get done instead of getting deferred until things break, and the barrier to entry drops massively because companies don't have to maintain their own lines, which means more competitors providing service.
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When we moved from many, many ISPs to just a few Cable Providers in the 1990's we mistakenly made only a few large telco and cable companies responsible for the internet. This is by definition monopoly power. It disgusts me that we trust an organization with this level of evil with ensuring free and fair communication.
Why do we put up with this?
It was no mistake. It was Lower Prices Everyday [TM].
My ISP changed names about 4 times as it got bought by bigger and bigger companies. Because the bigger companies had more efficiencies of scale. They could buy goods and services in bigger volumes, thus achieving more profitability than their smaller rivals. They could afford to buy smaller rivals outright. And it's a positive feedback loop. The bigger you are, the bigger you can get - nothing succeeds like success.
A lot of people who worship The Free Market as a god have this mental image that a totally free market can exist where all buyers and sellers have equal power.
For the most part, you only get that with gross commodities and small startup costs. Dry cleaning establishments, independent eateries and so forth.
A Capital Market is different. If you need to raise capital just to get started, you're already seeing market freedom drop out. Relatively few people are willing (or often even able) to risk substantial amounts of money to build a plant, tool it up, obtain raw materials, invest in warehousing and shipping infrastructure (even outsourced, there are expenses), and hire the various people to keep it all running. What retail customers end up with is typically an asymmetric take-it-or-leave-it set of choices from an extremely limited set of suppliers. But Please Stay on the Line, Your Call is very important to us!
Granted, an ISP isn't exactly your classical Dark Satanic Mill. My original ISP was a guy who'd installed some surplus racks in a spare bedroom and operated over dialup POTS. His successors probably spend about half as much for 10 times as much capacity because they have Economies of Scale. He probably wouldn't even be able to get a foot in the door these days.
And that's not even counting the infamous Last Mile where the fewer the number of players digging up the neighborhood the better.