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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.
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?
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Switching providers may not help because they may be oversubscribing their backbone or uplink just as much as your own ISP.
I don't have an issue of ISPs providing different latency tiers or different levels of guaranteed bandwidth. But the choice should be on the customer buying the connection. The ISP shouldn't be using quality of service or resource reservation protocols to improve traffic to their own services (like VoIP) and not those of their competitors. Nor should third parties be allowed to pay the ISP to alter traffic flows within that ISP's network to the detriment of other third parties. If MegaCorp X wants to speed things up to their site, they need to work with the ISP to add their own PoP.
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?
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...
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
IMO, it solves all of the most egregious problems. And I don't think it is an overreach. The purpose of Title II classification was historically to cover voice telephony. A large percentage of Internet users now do their voice telephony over broadband. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to treat the underlying broadband under Title II, as it would be impossible to enforce Title II on telephony companies without the underlying communication infrastructure being covered by similar laws.
Whoa there. I didn't call everyone stupid. I respect some people who disagree with the Title II reclassification. I just don't respect people who make patently absurd claims, like saying that self-driving cars won't be possible without paid prioritization (when, in fact, self-driving cars barely use the Internet at all; they don't need it).
In theory, you bet. The problem is that the FTC has been completely toothless for as long as I can remember. At least the FCC occasionally acts. :-)
I'm not going to dig into the problem of peering agreements and the way they've been set up, as that's not my area of expertise. Instead, I'll focus on the consumer problems.
The fundamental problem is that Internet service is a commodity. One provider that passes packets is as good as another, assuming they all provide the same quantity per unit time and with similar levels of quality. There are very narrow areas in which they can compete, mostly involving the amount of speed that they provide. So to provide any useful value-add, companies are forced to package unrelated services, such as cable TV, telephone, video-on-demand, etc. Because those services compete with other Internet services, but are almost always provided by servers within the company's network, those services are almost inherently less affected by network speeds than third-party services unless the providers take reasonable steps to ensure that services are not getting de facto throttled by insufficient external bandwidth.
The ideal solution would be to pass a federal broadband access act that creates an unfunded mandate for states to provide fiber to every home and business by a particular date, owned by the state, and leased to any ISP that wants to lease lines. This would create a huge flurry of competition that would largely negate the need for any sort of additional net neutrality regulation. But the cable and phone companies would never let such a law pass.
A slightly less ideal solution would be to take the leased line rules that currently apply only to telephone lines (IIRC) and extending them to all companies that own any communications infrastructure (whether fiber, coax, twisted pair, or cellular). Specifically, require that they make that infrastructure available to any ISP that wants to provide service, at a cost just above the cost of maintaining the wires. This would make it trivial to have proper competition in broadband. This would, of course, cause all of the existing ISPs to wet themselves, and they would find ways to guarantee that any such bill never saw the light of day
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Yep.
And hands up who wants their automotive safety to depend on a Comcast Internet connection?
No sig today...
Yep.
And hands up who wants their automotive safety to depend on a Comcast Internet connection?
OK, heart surgery under way.
Scalpel check
(2 hours later)
What do you mean it's reached it's data cap and it's buffering? This patient is going to die!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --