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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."
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?
Sure till its effectivly a walled garden. This es exactly what net neutrality has to protect us from. Then its the refusal to get enough bandwidth to any but preferred sites.
No sir I dont like it.
... 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....
That's unfair advantage. Especially when companies like Netflix are paying Comcast to get on Comcast's network.
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.
...Note active voice "Comcast's response is that Stream TV doesn't go over the internet, but is delivered over the same closed path as its cable streams...
That's a diversion. It's the same coax going into the house, it's the same overall bandwidth on that coax. Comcast is playing with words.
That would almost make sense if they similarly exempted traffic from any server co-located in their data centers, like the free CDN solution Netflix offers ISPs to reduce congestion on their external links. Except they don't do that, they charge Netflix AND count it against the cap.
I don't think you understand net neutrality, or how ridiculous Comcast is.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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.
Of course there isn't - they're slowing the speed of the other services to 100GB per month, while not similarly slowing the speed of their own service.
The fact that "speed" is not measured across a second, but a month in this instance is irrelevant, it's still quantity of data per fixed amount of time.
No, it should include sites wholly owned by the ISP, too. There's no reason Comcast's video-on-demand service should get preferential treatment over Netflix. There's no reason Comcast's own VoIP service should get preferential treatment over Skype. The main point of Net Neutrality was precisely to prevent first-party services by monopoly ISPs from engaging in unfair competition against third-party services. ISPs favoring one third-party service in exchange for monetary compensation has always been of secondary concern.
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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.