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Comcast Says Should Be Able To Create Internet Fast Lanes For Self-Driving Cars (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Comcast filed comments in support of the FCC's plan to kill the 2015 net neutrality rules today. And while pretty much everything in them is expected -- Comcast thinks the rules are burdensome and hurt investment, yet it says it generally supports the principles of net neutrality -- there's one telling new quirk that stands out in its phrasing: Comcast now says it's in support of a ban on "anticompetitive paid prioritization," which is really a way of saying paid prioritization should be allowed. "The commission also should bear in mind that a more flexible approach to prioritization may be warranted and may be beneficial to the public," Comcast says in its filing. The key qualification is "anticompetitive," which is a term that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways depending on who's defining it.
Comcast doesn't just see paid fast lanes being useful for medicine, however. It also thinks they might be fair to sell to automakers for use in autonomous vehicles. "Likewise, for autonomous vehicles that may require instantaneous data transmission, black letter prohibitions on paid prioritization may actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it," the filing says. This makes Comcast's position pretty confusing. Comcast says it opposes prioritizing one website over another. It even suggests the commission adopt a "strong presumption against" agreements that benefit an ISP's own content over competitors' work, but it's not clear how benefiting one car company or telemedicine company over another is any different.
Comcast doesn't just see paid fast lanes being useful for medicine, however. It also thinks they might be fair to sell to automakers for use in autonomous vehicles. "Likewise, for autonomous vehicles that may require instantaneous data transmission, black letter prohibitions on paid prioritization may actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it," the filing says. This makes Comcast's position pretty confusing. Comcast says it opposes prioritizing one website over another. It even suggests the commission adopt a "strong presumption against" agreements that benefit an ISP's own content over competitors' work, but it's not clear how benefiting one car company or telemedicine company over another is any different.
Why should we use slower Comcast lanes in medicine?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We're against net neutrality when it hurts our bottom line and we're for it when it helps our bottom line. They don't care about customers; they care about profit.
Quit selling internet saying it's the fastest when you actively slow things down. I don't care if you think other things are more important, I've paid the same price and expect the same service.
Also there's nothing about self driving cars that requires super low ping. Routes are precalculated and the real time data coming from on board sensors shouldn't have to go over the net for it to operate. Data coming from other vehicles doesn't need to go over the net immediately as the relevant cars are within wifi range.
Is it not, that the reason why some ask for net neutrality?
You know, in the good old days of the internet, if you wanted faster speeds, you'd order up a thicker pipe. If you ordered a thicker pipe, and one site on the internet couldn't deliver faster upload speeds (your download speeds), it meant that site needed to upgrade its pipe as well. If you ordered up a thicker pipe, and many, if not most of the internet, couldn't deliver faster upload speeds (again, your download speeds), it meant your ISP, or your ISP's ISP, or your ISP's ISP's ISP needed to upgrade their network, at which point they either did, or you switched providers.
Comcast wants to essentially privatize what is currently public domain, rather than alternatively building out its own private domain. What a bunch of cunts. Build your own separate super-fast network and sell it privately, leave the rest of us *(the entire world)* out of your greedy rationalizations of monopoly and usurpation. Comcast is a giant sucking sound.
we've always been at war with Eurasia.
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My comcast internet service has been up and down for the past year. Every time I call to get it fixed I get the same song and dance. We are or have sent someone out to fix it and this is no longer a problem. Only to have it go down for a week or so later.
So, if they can't keep my fucking cable modem up a month or so, why the hell should I trust them with a automatic car?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
No engineer in his/her right mind would ever even consider designing a self-driving car in such a way that it required instantaneous communication. There's too much potential for network failures even under ideal circumstances with a perfect signal, just from routing problems alone. And that's before you consider vehicles driving through tunnels, rain fade, spectrum congestion, deliberate interference, etc.
Basically, the FCC asked, as part of people's filings, to come up with ideas for innovation that would be made impossible without paid prioritization. As expected, Comcast tried, and as expected, failed.
Fundamentally, Internet service either works or it doesn't. If slowness causes something to fail, then the service doesn't work, and therefore the best that paid prioritization can do is give the customers the service that they paid for. If slowness does not cause something to fail, then paid prioritization serves no beneficial purpose.
Therefore, there is no plausible situation in which paid prioritization can possibly be beneficial to consumers. Period. At best, it can only increase the potential for consumer harm, and at worst, it is the direct cause of consumer harm.
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It isn't self driving at all, and I don't want to be in one either. If it needs that level of connection to drive itself then what happens when the connection cuts out even for a bit? Also who would want to sell something with that sort of ongoing cost attached if they could avoid it?
Almost like they have a solution and are searching for problems, without regard for truth or even respect of the intelligence of the people they intend to pass the "problems" off to. If I was a government official and received this sort of reason I would be insulted, even if I didn't show it.
Do ambulances automatically get higher priority than rich people in their cars, or does the ambulance's allowed speed depend on the bank balance of the patient?
Will people who are allowed to go faster than everyone else be taxed appropriately, or can rich people pretend to be poor when it suits them?
Comcast cant deliver any of the bandwidth they promise. Their infrastructure is well over 10 years old and they REFUSE to upgrade it all over the place.
They can barely deliver 50mbps to customers regularly and reliably, they have ZERO chance of getting anything wireless working for self driving cars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comcast now says it's in support of a ban on "anticompetitive paid prioritization,"
Yet comcast is in favor of, and even implements, data caps on their ISP service, while comcast's video on demand services are exempt from those data caps.
.
Data caps imposed upon competitors' video on demand services but not imposed on comcast's video on demand services are anti-competitive.
Bad analogy. A better analogy to what is proposing is that Comcast wants a toll road that's "faster". By "faster" they mean faster than what they have before but not faster than existing, competing roads. But you have to pay them whatever they'll charge. Your car manufacturer will also have to pay them for you to use your car. Also they get to dictate what kind of cars use the road. Also they sell cars themselves that will go faster than any cars you want to use--somehow. And if anyone else builds a competing road like your city, they'll sue them so a competing toll road doesn't get built.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
To hold Comcast's bullshit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
so when the brakes fail how long will I wait holding the line for jay (not his real name) to help me with an deep foreign accent?
well with Comcast muilt-gig you can get your own pipe*.
Starting at $299/mo
*home use only, 3 year contract required, $1000 install fee, you must rent our hardware at an added cost, limited part of our cable network only.
fringe roaming is an issue as well as small as 1GB can cost near the cost an new car as some networks bill $15-$20 a meg when roaming.
If self driving cars are using public internet (especially Comcast internet) for time-sensitive communication, they are doing it wrong. They should be using short-range real-time networks for fast local communication, and then when they need to talk to a server, they don't need to be in such a hurry.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with different classes of service. If Comcast wants to offer a special class of service that has high-throughput and well-characterized latency, then there's no problem. That's no different than offering both high-speed fiber and slow dial-up service.
What net neutrality prevents is Comcast offering such a service, but then charging customers differently depending on where they want to send their packets.
Also, nothing would prevent Comcast from creating whatever restrictions they want on a private intranet. Just don't claim to customers that's it's part of the Internet.
If Comcast wants to fast-lane a single application like manufacturer-to-car communications on a private network there is and should be absolutely nothing to stop it. Not all applications need the Internet. Most any large ISP will happily sell you a lightning fast MPLS network, a mobile version of such (MPN, DMNR, dedicated APN), or lease a lambda or dark fiber for dedicated point-to-point traffic. These arguments are completely irrelevant to the discussion of Internet neutrality issues.
I'm confused; there isn't any reason why Comcast can't sell a particular service to automobile manufacturers, or self-driving car users, etc. Any ISP can provide a speciality service to anyone they want to provide it to, at least that is my understanding.
I thought that the idea of net neutrality and common carrier status is that if I (a consumer) purchase a general purpose Internet service, Comcast (the provider), doesn't interfere with the data that I want to transmit/receive over that service, regardless of where the data comes from; and doesn't start charging more just because the data is coming from source A rather than B.
Therefore, there is no plausible situation in which paid prioritization can possibly be beneficial to consumers. Period. At best, it can only increase the potential for consumer harm, and at worst, it is the direct cause of consumer harm.
Your title was "special kind of stupid". Here's a question for you:
Background: The existing rule was notable in that 1) It was a gross overreach for the FCC, in that it was implemented under Title II classification 2) It actually does not completely or correctly implement net neutrality (in the way people expect when they use the term).
My question: Since net neutrality is apparently so obvious that anyone who doesn't "get it" is stupid, can you come up with a regulation that solves the problems noted in the background?
How about proposing an actual law that can be voted on in congress?
It can be written as open source, Google and Microsoft can have their lawyers go over it, the public can read and review it, and then it can be presented to the legislature for implementation.
We can say, in effect: "here is the correct solution, please implement it".
Just to get things started, how about the law is implemented not solely for the internet, but as an anti-trust problem? We could have the law enforced by the FTC instead of the FCC, and therefore apply not only to the internet, but other forms of communication and trade as well. (For example: Visa and Mastercard must treat all clients equally, and not deny certain companies from using their services, or charge different per-transaction amounts for different companies.)
And the law should have language that spells out the goals and guidelines, so that it can be used to cover new methods of communication and devices as they are developed in the future.
In short, instead of calling everyone stupid and, basically, just carrying on, how about we do something to actually *fix* the problems?
It can't be that hard, because see is as obvious.
Why not work to actually fix the problems?
If Comcast, et. al. want to prioritize traffic, that means they know what traffic is going through their lines. How else would you know how to charge OrgA more than OrgB. Ipso facto, they have to drop the argument for why they qualify for common carrier status. You can't say you know and don't know what's going through the lines in the same breath. Well, yeah, I guess they can...but, nobody has to believe it.
If they're not going to be a neutral pipe, they can't logically continue to have common carrier status and will be responsible for any child pornography transmitted through their servers.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
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No engineer in his/her right mind would ever even consider designing a self-driving car in such a way that it required instantaneous communication.
Ah, but see, we're talking about what Comcast's engineers would do...
The ultimate form of "vertical integration" but by force. Reminds me of Homer's "Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net". Gates say to BUY HIM OUT BOYS and then says "You don't think I got this rich writing a bunch of checks" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Of topic, but if you have to deal with comcast service, the chat is far better. If accents annoy you there's that, but also waiting in front of a computer is less annoying than waiting with a phone up to your ear. YMMV.
so tunnels will be use less as well very rual areas (maybe the union trucks can get the union wire line techs to take out the towers in real ares so truckers don't get layed off)
is it better or is it just some bot where you can have 1 person looking over 5 bot chats at the same time.
It is highly likely that you're wrong. And by highly likely, I mean absolutely certain. I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that no self-driving car system will ever be a centralized control system, because that would be fundamentally unsafe, for several reasons:
It is simply not realistic to believe that anyone would design a self-driving car system that is controlled from outside of the vehicle itself. That's why nobody is doing that. Nobody.
Note that self-driving cars do periodically use the Internet for things like asking for road condition updates, both to avoid closed roads and to alert it ahead of time about lane closures that might require special attention. None of that functionality, however, is life-critical, and any self-driving car must be able to cope without that information (both because it might not be kept up-to-date by local authorities and because the network might not always work). And in any case, that data communication is not continuous. A single data burst every couple of hours would likely be perfectly fine, and when you're talking about something that infrequent, you have a lot of opportunities to retry before it becomes important. That makes autonomous vehicle communications quite possibly the single least important data flowing over the Internet, priority-wise.
In other words, it's hard to imagine how you could possibly be more wrong.
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I could imagine some situations where paid prioritization might be actively beneficial. Unfortunately, the possibilities for abuse are far too great to ignore.
Any positive effects from paid prioritization would stem not from some nebulous increase in speed, but from reduced interruptions due to congestion. I could easily imagine traffic being bifurcated into two categories, where if a router reaches capacity it ensures that traffic in one category takes priority so that it can continue with minimal disruption. It's possible to implement this in such a way that existing traffic isn't slowed, but only by adding new capacity. This kind of thing might be nice if, say, every customer had a certain percentage of their traffic designated as "fast lane", and they could choose which traffic to allocate. Low-latency, low-bandwidth operations like interactive gaming could benefit greatly if the bifurcation of traffic actually improved worst-case latency.
My worry is that what would happen if paid prioritization were to be allowed is that companies would feel free to use it as a means to force everybody onto the fast lane, and thus increase fees. Worse, it could dramatically worsen the Internet as small providers are priced out. I don't trust the current government to implement a rule that would prevent this outcome.
They deliver Internet. Period. The fact that they know about self driving cars drives home the fact we need net neutrality.
So COMCAST wants to do self-driving cars. Lets see, these cars will probably cost 100,000 USD each. So instead of building better infrastructure and invest the profits in the infrastructure, they want yet another freebie.
Remind me, why is COMCAST regularly at the top of list of the most hated companies again ?
I thought that the idea of net neutrality...
Lots of people have their own ideas about what constitutes net neutrality, and not many of them are the same. There are some absolutists on both sides, and from what I hear talking to people, the general public is too unaware about the uses of contentionless/prioritized networks, and the measures necessary to keep harmful traffic at bay on the network at large, to sympathize with the provisions necessary to get the most out the Internet. Doesn't help that the telco companies are such a bunch of odious nipple twisters.
Personally I think we should ask math/game-theory/computational-simulation specialists to model what percent of the Internet needs to be "neutral" to preserve a beneficial market, and error on the more neutral side of that figure. And the model should include CDNs not just ISPs.
You know, evidence based policy and such, rather than just a tug of war between corporate greed on one side and hate for local cable companies on the other.
Someone had to do it.
I'm confused; there isn't any reason why Comcast can't sell a particular service to automobile manufacturers, or self-driving car users, etc. Any ISP can provide a speciality service to anyone they want to provide it to, at least that is my understanding.
Depends on if that specialty service cripples other things without you having to pay more for your other services. Should all that be legal?
I thought that the idea of net neutrality and common carrier status is that if I (a consumer) purchase a general purpose Internet service, Comcast (the provider), doesn't interfere with the data that I want to transmit/receive over that service, regardless of where the data comes from; and doesn't start charging more just because the data is coming from source A rather than B.
Yes but Comcast also selling a service has been known to interfere with traffic that competes with them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No. ATM gives you e. coli.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The existing rule was notable in that 1) It was a gross overreach for the FCC, in that it was implemented under Title II classification 2) It actually does not completely or correctly implement net neutrality (in the way people expect when they use the term)
How was it a “gross overreach” and a failure in regard to network neutrality?
As far as I understand, the FCC was created (through the Communications Act of 1934) for the regulation of the commerce of communication services by wire and radio. Its goals are, in part, the establishment of “a rapid, efficient, nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges”, which is “available ... to all the people of the United States”.
The act covers commercial (for hire) telecommunications networks regardless of medium (wire, radio), form (telegraph, telephone, broadcast radio and, later, television and Internet), content (text, voice, images, etc.), addressing mode (unicast, broadcast).
Title II of the act defines rules applicable to common carriers (a carrier being defined as “any person engaged as common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio...”). I don’t see how Internet data communications carriers (using wire or radio) could fail to be included in the definition.
The reference to commerce, and those to qualitative aspects of the service, including fairness (available to all and affordable), make the FCC’s mandate rather clear (no need for the FTC here). This is reinforced by Title II’s prohibition of “unjust or unreasonable charges [and] practices” (“directly or indirectly, by any means or device”), as well as “unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges [and] practices”, either by advantaging or disadvantaging a particular person, class of persons, or locality.
I understand those articles as expressing the clear intent by Congress, from the very beginning, to ensure network neutrality, regardless of technology; and so I’d argue that the act does, in fact, a decent job covering the fundamentals in that regard.
So, in your point of view, what is the nature of the overreach? And how does the act fail to adequately address network neutrality?
Real person. I'm sure they are holding multiple chats at once based on the delays between responses, but it's still definitely better than being on the phone.
At this point it seems Comcast is coming up with the most bullshit drivel they can muster to see if people get confused by them and ultimately believe by default... I wonder what's next. Fast lanes are needed to solve climate change, create a cure for cancer, and avoid WW3?
As if car automation would rely on Comcast service whatever form it comes, and as if Comcast could guarantee instantaneous data transmission for them.
Pretty much the opposite is true. Comcast and the others that are part of the ISP oligopolies are the ones doing everything they can to stop initiatives like Google Fiber. If there's any hope for true instantaneous data transmission ever, it will come from technology that will ultimately break the current oligopolies, like indefinite expansion of Google Fi.
These jokers keep throwing shit to see if it sticks at legislators and the public.
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This is one of the most thoughtful comments on the matter that I've read on /. While I think the concept of net neutrality is important in a world where there is not nearly enough ISP competition to give consumers an upper hand, I also realize that there can be down sides to limiting how companies manage their information flow. I like your idea for considering both sides in policy making, but unfortunately we must polarize these topics to the point of inneffective or otherwise sub optimal solutions.
The current net neutrality rules extend common carrier even to those that zero-rate (prefer) their own content. This was done early-Obama era so providers could provide their own music and video sites which didn't go against your data. Prior to that, cell phone and other ISPs were common carriers and zero rating would've lost them that status.
The practice of simply ignoring your competitions bandwidth at the exchange (e.g. Letting your connection with Netflix and YouTube go to 100% and refusing to accept more traffic) has been commonplace all along even though receiving traffic at an exchange is practically free.
The current FCC is trying to get rid of the prior regulation so carriers would be once again "common carriers" but it doesn't address the anticompetitive practice of refusing to expand your capacity in order to prioritize in-network traffic.
Both Obama and Trump FCCs have allowed anticompetitive practices like Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T merging into a giant conglomerate tied together with their namesake media production companies by shell companies.
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Bigger Crashes.. Make sure your manually driven car is equipped with blood spatter shields.
What exactly do you get without net neutrality except rent-seeking?
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The whole concept is ridiculous anyway. You don't need to-the-microsecond updates about traffic 30 miles away; to-the-minute is fine, and we can do way better than that.
Real-time situational awareness from anything other than your own sensors should come from a mesh network with nearby cars.
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Actually, it was Obama's FCC that reclassified them as common carriers (Title II) about two years ago. The current FCC commissioners want to roll that back, thus removing the anti-throttling regulations that could otherwise be used to force carriers to actually provide enough bandwidth for their competitors to compete.
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You're certainly right about it being useful to prioritize traffic based on whether increased latency will affect usability. The part that is inherently anticompetitive is where you insert the word "paid" in there and prioritize one content provider's traffic over another instead of prioritizing one type of traffic over another.
I have yet to see anything even approaching a legitimate argument in favor of paid prioritization.
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Self driving cars should not in anyway need to rely on internet or outside communication (other than updating mapinfo once in a while). If the car can't drive on it's own without even having to rely in the slightest on internet, that car does not belong on the road.
QOS is allowed under net neutrality regs so, WTF Comcast.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Nope, already lost interest.
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