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PSA: Comcast Doesn't Really Support Net Neutrality (slate.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate: Anyone who has ever paid a bill to or waited for customer service from Comcast knows why it is one of America's most detested companies, its recent efforts to improve its image notwithstanding. While Comcast says its customers will "enjoy strong net neutrality protections," it hasn't explicitly said it won't offer paid prioritization, which is how the company would most likely monetize its new ability to legally muck with internet traffic. In other words, Comcast might not choke or slow service to any website, but it could speed access to destinations that pay for the priority service. The company's promises should sound familiar. As Jon Brodkin pointed out in Ars Technica on Monday, back when the FCC was crafting the network neutrality rules in 2014, Comcast said it had no plans to enact paid prioritization, either. "We don't prioritize Internet traffic or have paid fast lanes, and have no plans to do so," a Comcast executive wrote in a blog post that year.
But Comcast's line has changed in an important way. In a comment to the FCC from earlier this year, the company said it is time for the FCC to adopt a "more flexible" approach to paid prioritization, and noted in a blog post at the time that the FCC should consider net neutrality principles that prevent "no anticompetitive paid prioritization." In other words, not necessarily all paid prioritization. The inclusion of "anti-competitive" could signal that the company does in fact hope to offer fast-lane service, but at the same price for all. And it might be a price that say, Fox News and the New York Times can afford, but one that smaller outlets can't. That Comcast's language is changing is one reason to distrust its promises regarding net neutrality, but its track record is an even bigger one. The company has been caught red-handed lying about its traffic discrimination in the past. In 2007, for example, when Comcast was found intermittently blocking users' ability to use BitTorrent, the company made numerous false claims about its network interference before finally admitting its bad behavior and halting the disruptions.
But Comcast's line has changed in an important way. In a comment to the FCC from earlier this year, the company said it is time for the FCC to adopt a "more flexible" approach to paid prioritization, and noted in a blog post at the time that the FCC should consider net neutrality principles that prevent "no anticompetitive paid prioritization." In other words, not necessarily all paid prioritization. The inclusion of "anti-competitive" could signal that the company does in fact hope to offer fast-lane service, but at the same price for all. And it might be a price that say, Fox News and the New York Times can afford, but one that smaller outlets can't. That Comcast's language is changing is one reason to distrust its promises regarding net neutrality, but its track record is an even bigger one. The company has been caught red-handed lying about its traffic discrimination in the past. In 2007, for example, when Comcast was found intermittently blocking users' ability to use BitTorrent, the company made numerous false claims about its network interference before finally admitting its bad behavior and halting the disruptions.
So yes, they are lying. What did you expect?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You realize that in a market with hugely, bigly asymmetrical power, letting 'the market' decide is just another way of saying "let the megacorps run roughshod over their customers" right?
Because that is precisely what will happen. Comcast knows that for a large number of their customers they have no viable alternative. And they *WILL* act accordingly. The same is true for every other ISP. There's a bit of competition with the cellular service providers; but if they all take a page from the "being an evil dickbag company" handbook -- competition won't matter in the least.
there are only two things that keep companies honest:
1. regulators with actual testicles and teeth
2. competition.
Comcast has never had one of those, and is on the precipice of doing away with the other.
Netflix in particular has driven the need to massively increase bandwidth across the whole internet. The rest of the internet is subsidizing their business, in effect. That's not exactly fair, either.
That entire arguments hings on the idea that it is somehow fair to oversell bandwidth.
Since selling things you can't deliver is fraudulent to begin with it doesn't hold.
you pay for a connection... period. That's the definition of ISP model revenue stream.
Killing Net Neutrality will allow the communications cabal (AT&T/Comcast/Verizon) to say-"Oh! You want netflix, now you have to buy an -entertainment bundle- to visit that site". Or the "sports bundle" if you want to watch ESPN stream. They really want to turn the internet into "packages" like they've done with cable TV. The difference here is that ESPN & HBO on the cable side license their content and charge stations. With Netflix/Hulu/Prime, we the consumers are already paying for the content, plus we're paying for the connection, plus the cabal wants the charge the content providers usage of their path ways, plus charge the consumer extra...
AND they want to build profiles and sell your surfing habits to marketers (aka facebook) and you as a consumer have no rights or protections without NN.
This is an $8B give away to the communications cabal at the expense of the American consumer. Nothing more.
ISP's complaining about binge watchers is a red herring. You already pay for the connection rated at X mbps, on top of that they limit your total monthly consumption. Now they want to charge you extra for going to Y site. This is the GOP being owned by the communications cabal.
"Comcast Doesn't Really Support Net Neutrality"
No shit...what was your first clue, Captain Obvious?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How is this Netflix's problem? It's Comcast's problem if their users are requesting more data than they can handle. Why should Netflix pay anything? In fact, if Comcast wasn't already an incumbent near monopoly, they would be having to pay someone else for a pipe big enough to download all the data their users wanted. Just because they happen to be considered a tier one peer on the internet shouldn't allow them to pull so much data without paying for it. They're just lucky they got grandfathered into an unlimited plan, otherwise they might have to ask their users to pay for their bandwidth - but they're already gouging their users for profits...
The internet has never worked that way.
The actual problem is Netflix's ISP(s). They have an obligation to exchange equal amounts of traffic with Comcast or pay for the excess coming from their network towards Comcast's. THIS is how the internet has always worked.
I find it amazing that you think Netflix should get free internet. Are there any other large companies that should get free internet access?
ISPs should automatically make caching servers available for services like Netflix, or rack space, if that makes sense. (Advertisements should be designed to be one of the first things cached.
They do, it's just that Netflix didn't want to pay for that either. Every other content generator either pays for transit or uses a CDN that does the same. I don't see why Netflix or another company should get free access to an ISPs network.
Netflix in particular has driven the need to massively increase bandwidth across the whole internet. The rest of the internet is subsidizing their business, in effect. That's not exactly fair, either.
Considering the fact that people pay for the bandwidth they use to view Netflix content and Netflix pays for their bandwidth to the internet backbone it's hardly what you'd call "unfair". All we're really talking about here is the same problem that caused ISPs to throttle torrents back in the day, them overselling their bandwidth and then having people actually use way more of that bandwith than they had anticipated.
Thus all it really boils down to is business miscalculations made by managers at ISPs...
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Power and water are not sold like that. I don't pay a flat rate for an advertised 30A power supply to my house on the assumption that my average will be 300mA and that I'll burst to 30A, I pay for the amount that I consume. The same for water.
This typically isn't done for network connections, because the cost of providing the service is not proportional to how much you use, it's proportional to the peak load on the network. At off-peak times, there's no extra cost if you allow someone to saturate their connection, but at peak times you may only have enough off-net bandwidth (or second-hop bandwidth) to allow everyone to get 50% or less of their peak.
The biggest problem that I have with ISPs is not that they charge this way, but that they advertise in a misleading way. They advertise unlimited 100Mb/s (or whatever), when what they mean is '100Mb/s peak, 1Gb/s off-net bandwidth per 10 customers' or similar. ISPs here used to advertise contention ratios (and have different tiers for different contention ratios), but this ended when they realised that the ratios they were not comparable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's a very shortsighted view. Corporations benefit from things that increase their ability to do business. Individuals benefit from some of the things that corporations do and are harmed by others. If something makes it easier for corporations to do business then that alone gives you no information about whether it's going to benefit you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Everything you said can and does happen under current "net neutrality" regulation. Yeah, I wish there were laws that prohibited ISPs from oversubscribing a neighborhood -- I hate that my available bandwidth takes a nose dive every night at 6 when all the neighbors start Netflixing.
sig: sauer
You realise your conduct on slashdot makes your product look like it was developed by someone unhinged, right?
You realize that he literally is completely unhinged, right? It's not that his product looks like it was developed by someone unhinged, it actually was. Have you ever seen a single developer put "++" in their version number? He likes to make his stuff look more impressive than it actually is (this is a text sorting program that makes HTTP requests and writes to a file).
Just wait, he'll be along in no time to post a completely unhinged reply to this. AI is going to become self-aware long before APK ever does.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Hogwash - end CONSUMERS are paying for the connection at the other end while Comcast/AT&T/Verizon are still making record profits
Again, an ISP a service you're paying for connectivity. As a business, monitor your backbone and if you need to replace your switch faster with more/redundant switches, decrease switch planned replacement periods and if that makes you unprofitable, increase monthly rates. But that's not what they're doing. They want to carve up the internet and sell your personal data.
These greedy bully's are just trying to extract more revenue and using "elected" officials and laws to do so while removing consumer protections.