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Comcast Proves Need For Net Neutrality By Trying To Censor Advocacy Website (fightforthefuture.org)
Reader mrchaotica writes: As most Slashdot readers are probably aware, the FCC, under the direction of Trump-appointed chairman Ajit Pai, is trying to undo its 2015 decision to protect Net Neutrality (PDF) by classifying ISPs as common carriers. During the recent public comment period, the FCC's website was flooded with pro-Net-Neutrality comments from actual people (especially those who heeded John Oliver's call to arms) as well as anti-Net-Neutrality comments posted by bots using the names and addresses of people without their consent. The fake comments use boilerplate identical to that used in a 2010 press release by the conservative lobbying group Center for Individual Freedom (which is funded by Comcast, among other entities), but beyond that, the entities who perpetrated and funded the criminal acts have not been conclusively identified. In response to this brazen attempt to undermine the democratic process, the Internet freedom advocacy group Fight for the Future (FFTF) created the website Comcastroturf.com to call attention to the fraud and allow people to see if their identity had been misappropriated. Comcast, in a stunning display of its tone-deaf attitude towards free speech, has sent a cease-and-desist order to FFTF, claiming that Comcastroturf.com violates its "valuable intellectual property[sic]." According to the precedent set in Bosley Medical Institute, Inc. v. Kremer , websites created for the purpose of criticizing an organization can not be considered trademark infringement. As such, FFTF reportedly has no intention of taking down the site.
"This is exactly why we need Title II net neutrality protections that ban blocking, throttling, and censorship," said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, "If Ajit Pai's plan is enacted, there would be nothing preventing Comcast from simply blocking sites like Comcastroturf.com that are critical of their corporate policies," she added. "It also makes you wonder what Comcast is so afraid of? Are their lobbying dollars funding the astroturfing effort flooding the FCC with fake comments that we are encouraging Internet users to investigate?"
Could there be a better example to illustrate why ensuring strong Net Neutrality protections by regulating ISPs as common carriers is so important?
Can there be a better example? How about if they had actually blocked the site on their network? This is just a knee jerk take-down letter. Yawn.
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The story really has nothing to do with the network neutrality debate. It's standard corporate shotgun trademark protection; most anyone else using the Comcast name in their site like that would get the same response.
As you say, the real point of outrage would be if no Comcast customers would be able to access the site. But they have not done that, they have issued a legal request which they would have issued with ANY amount of network neutrality rules in place.
So then what does it matter if those rues are gone? This is exactly the problem with NN proponents; they have NO REAL IDEA what the rules are they are calling to stay in effect, and imagining they have all kinds of benefits that do not actually exist.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If he's not been paid off somehow, then there's a deal in place for when he leaves the FCC for some nice, well paid, well heeled position with some ISP megacorp.
He's made it clear that he's not having any counter argument to the point of holding his hands against his head and screaming "LALALALALAICAN'THEARYOU!" as he runs from interviews with journalists. Later, when they catch him going to lunch he'll have his goonish bodyguards pin the stray ones against the wall so they can't ask questions.
Could there be a better example to illustrate why ensuring strong Net Neutrality protections by regulating ISPs as common carriers is so important?
Well, throttling my non-Comcast VoIP provider would be one. Especially for cellphones that can use WiFi instead of the cell phone network in areas with lousy reception.
I certainly don't want them degrading a VoIP call to 911 or another emergency service (poison control, etc.), and in spite of the minuscule amount of bandwidth VoIP takes, Comcast has been happy in the past to throttle it to uselessness.
And what are my other options? DSL from my local telephone company? Satellite internet via AT&T's DirecTV? They also have a vested interest in making sure only their voice service works.
So, yeah... let's start with 911 service, and go from there.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Net Neutrality is a huge misdirection... it's getting people to accept that we are stuck with incumbent providers and have to get big brother to come save the day with regulations. If people demanded competition, we'd actually stop seeing a game of cat and mouse and none of us would care if Comcast decided to blackhole Netflix or put a 10G data cap on customers. The people paid for the last mile infrastructure with endless rounds of broadband initiative grants and corporate welfare, it's time the last mile is opened up to competition. Countries like the UK and Japan have competitive marketplaces with twisted pair copper or fiber plants and many ISPs have jumped at the opportunity to provide Internet connectivity to residential customers with lower rates and higher speeds. The moment ISP X decides to act against the interest of their customers, those very customers would have the choice to move to ISP A, B, or C... it's that simple.
We don't feel the need to tell Kroger or Publix that they have to carry Heinz ketchup and can't forbid Hunts from selling in their stores... if they don't carry the brands we want, we simply go elsewhere. It doesn't have to be complicated.
If Net Neutrality is struck down. Then Comcast can slow down sites to an unreasonable amount. They could make it take forever to reach any site which said anything bad about the company or provided any competing services.
If you do not think this would ever happen, just look at what happened to Netflix for Comcast users in February 2014.
Net Neutrality declares that all internet traffic is give the same priority (minus a few exceptions which are not related at all to the provider's ability to make more money). ISP's are supposed to provide access to the internet, not their selected version of the internet. Or just internet websites that give the ISP's more of a financial benefit.
If people did not want that they would not pay for it and it would die off.
That only works if there are viable alternatives or when the market isn't one of a natural monopoly. But neither one of those things need to have been said, since you were citing reality to begin with.
It is the fact that we are dealing with natural monopolies that make this a big deal and one which requires the utmost scrutiny.
And they already have. Part of the big Network Neutrality push came when Comcast slowed speeds to Netflix down and threatened to slow it down more if Netflix didn't pay up.
Why should I pay extra for Netflix to be as speedy as possible? I pay for Internet access and all sites should be as fast as they can be. Obviously, server speed, network issues, etc. will affect site speed, but a site speed factor shouldn't be my ISP deciding that SITE X should go slow unless someone (me or Site X) pays for speedy delivery.
This assumes a healthy market. The ISP market is NOT a health market. It's a realm of monopolies. I currently have Internet access from Charter (Spectrum, previously Time Warner Cable). They are my only option in the area I live in. Suppose Charter told me that I'd need to pay an additional $5 a month for Netflix data to flow at a reasonable speed - otherwise it would slow down to the point that the service would be useless. What would my options be? Pay Charter and suddenly using Netflix is $5 more expensive a month (through no fault of Netflix's)? Don't pay and stop using Netflix (possibly paying for Charter's cable TV package which we subscribe to now)? How do I vote with my wallet?
And what if Charter decides to do this with groups of websites? Want to use social media? $5 a month. Online video? $5 a month per site. News sites? $5 a month.
What - beyond Net Neutrality rules - would prevent an ISP from doing this if they are the only ISP in the area?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
But this is stupid because it also blocks the highly desirable goal of giving traffic priority to Netflix, which many would pay extra for. What is wrong with letting most people do something that is beneficial for them and they would like? Preventing that is how we got the war on drugs.
That may be your highly desirable goal. My goal is not to allow Netflix to have anymore traffic priority then Hulu, or HBO, or XFinity. The internet is what it is because newcomers were able to come and play with a minimum barrier to entry, to me protecting that is of the utmost importance. This is not analogous to the war on drugs. This is more like complaining that a law against price gouging is curtailing the price gougers freedoms.
ISP's are supposed to provide access to the internet, not their selected version of the internet
Why? Why does it have to be that way? What if that's what a lot of people want and are willing to pay for?
If people did not want that they would not pay for it and it would die off.
I would argue that it doesn't have to be this way, but it should be as long as most people have only one choice of broadband provider. You want this world where people have choices. Then we need some form of line sharing agreement so that I actually have a choice to make.
Also, this version of the internet has been tried before. It's what AOL was doing, and people left it in droves as soon as they could.
The Netflix incident was traced to a dispute over peering on a transit partner, not an issue of an ISP slowing traffic as so many have claimed.
So yeah, that was fake news.
No it wasn't, and stop using bullshit phrases to shut down the conversation. Netflix had to go to a peering partner because Comcast refused to discuss in good faith a direct linkage at the bandwidth levels that Comcast's own customers required. Then Comcast starved the peering partner by refusing to provide the proper throughput, even when the peering partner offered to pay all expenses related to it.
Comcast turned down offers of reasonable recompense and instead attacked the quality of the service in order to promote its own OTT video offering.
In short: They degraded another service in order to make it appear worse than of their own. This behaviour is exactly what Net Neutrality is designed to prevent.
News. Not Fake.
People who honestly question the need for Network Neutrality simply don't understand how an internet works. They latch onto a single convenient datum and ignore the system itself. Those who dishonestly question it are just assholes.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
It wasn't a harm but merely declining to bear the cost of Netflix's business model, and forcing even non-Netflix subscribers to pay for Netflix traffic in the process.
Comcast's customers were already paying for that traffic. Making Netflix/Level3 pay again is double-dipping.
Level3 offered to meet all costs involved in upgrading the connection. Comcast still refused. It was a bad faith interaction, and no amount of apologism and misconstruction will change that. Comcast wanted Netflix back on Akamai and other CDNs, and was willing to play dirty to get them back there.
Within a week of Netflix knuckling under and paying Comcast for access to its customers, video quality returned to pre-dispute levels. That means that this was never a hardware issue. It was Comcast deliberately slowing an information provider's traffic in order to extract more money from them.
Even if you grant—and I don't—that Comcast was right to demand more money, using artificial congestion to degrade their own customers' internet experience was an unethical move, and one that Net Neutrality would not allow. It's the business equivalent of holding a gun to the baby's head. Only an asshole would do that.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Again, when you cite "refusing to provide proper throughput" what you're really saying is that Comcast declined to throw more of its own resources toward other peoples' business models. They didn't "starve the peering partner." Rather, the peering partner didn't have the resources to deliver the traffic it tried to deliver.
Put it this way: I don't subscribe to Netflix streaming. When you insist that Comcast MUST provide extra service to this peering partner so that Netflix can make money, you're really saying that Comcast must divert resources away from investments that would benefit all of it's customers and toward ones that are focused on benefiting those who subscribe to Netflix, and to Netflix itself.
Why should part of what I pay for Comcast internet be required to subsidize Netflix and their subscribers?
That's the big problem with this version of Network Neutrality. It's fundamentally not neutral at all, but about tilting the playingfield toward certain businesses like Netflix.