Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Supports Ban On Paid Prioritization, Except For 'Specialized Services' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit consumers, a company executive said this week. Comcast Senior Executive VP David Cohen, who is generally the public face in Comcast's dealings with government policymakers, spoke about paid prioritization at the Free State Foundation's Telecom Policy Conference on Tuesday. (Video available on C-SPAN's website; the segment begins at 2:20.) "How about if we agree to a prohibition on paid prioritization and we have a limited exception created in some way for this concept of specialized services," Cohen said.
Cohen's suggestion of a paid-prioritization ban with an exception for specialized services is similar to an early version of net neutrality rules that was passed in 2010 but thrown out in court in 2014. (The FCC was able to impose stricter net neutrality rules in 2015; that's the set of rules that is being thrown out by the current FCC.) The FCC in 2010 said that specialized services may share capacity with broadband networks but wouldn't be the same as regular broadband. There has never been a great definition of the term, but the 2010 FCC said that broadband providers' facilities-based VoIP and Internet Protocol-video offerings would be included. These services "differ from broadband Internet access service and may drive additional private investment in broadband networks and provide end users valued services, supplementing the benefits of the open Internet," the FCC said at the time. Under the 2010 rules, ISPs could have charged other companies for the right to offer specialized services over broadband networks. Cohen didn't say exactly what types of future services should be covered by an exemption for specialized services. But the services may come along soon enough, he said. "There is a recognition that something might come along that is not anti-competitive, that is pro-consumer, that is a specialized service available not to every user of the Internet, [and] that would be in consumers' interests and in the public interest," Cohen said.
Cohen's suggestion of a paid-prioritization ban with an exception for specialized services is similar to an early version of net neutrality rules that was passed in 2010 but thrown out in court in 2014. (The FCC was able to impose stricter net neutrality rules in 2015; that's the set of rules that is being thrown out by the current FCC.) The FCC in 2010 said that specialized services may share capacity with broadband networks but wouldn't be the same as regular broadband. There has never been a great definition of the term, but the 2010 FCC said that broadband providers' facilities-based VoIP and Internet Protocol-video offerings would be included. These services "differ from broadband Internet access service and may drive additional private investment in broadband networks and provide end users valued services, supplementing the benefits of the open Internet," the FCC said at the time. Under the 2010 rules, ISPs could have charged other companies for the right to offer specialized services over broadband networks. Cohen didn't say exactly what types of future services should be covered by an exemption for specialized services. But the services may come along soon enough, he said. "There is a recognition that something might come along that is not anti-competitive, that is pro-consumer, that is a specialized service available not to every user of the Internet, [and] that would be in consumers' interests and in the public interest," Cohen said.
Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit Comcast
If your customer can pay you more, let them.
Doesn't every service specialize in their service?
1.5 Mbps DSL:
http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5
Or nothing of course we support 1.5 Mbps DSL. Comcast has the government-granted monopoly over most of Seattle, but the the city council doesn't require them to offer service for their entire monopoly area.
Comcast Supports Ban On Paid Prioritization, Except For 'Specialized Services'
Like access to prompt, polite Customer Support. Just kidding... we're funny.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Give them this and it's guaranteed they'll abuse it above and beyond the stated intent.
....They do kinda have a point. Hear me out. In a prior life, I worked with a company providing VoIP phone systems for companies to bypass the traditional telecom system. One of our biggest issues (somewhat mitigated since in the last few years as I understand) that we encountered in deployments was the ridiculous variability in latency, which is tiny for web browsing but horrible for real-time communications.
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that. Otherwise, yeah, it's Comcrap looking to rake in more bucks. Yawn.
That's not the "specialized services" comcast is looking for. Move along.
The whole point of ban on paid prioritization is prevention of exactly this type of leveraging of the ISPs position.
The end user is just as much a part of the public "Internet" as Bing or MySpace. Packets crossing administrative boundary between Comcast's network and customer's Internet network over customers public Internet address and customer's Internet infrastructure is no different than packets crossing boundary between Comcast and Level3.
The locality of ISP provided services already affords the ISP plenty of baked-in advantage AS-IS without granting them cover to artificially benefit themselves at the expense of competitors originating from a different network.
You nerds lost. Business won. Leftism lost. Libertarians won. Itâ(TM)s over.
....They do kinda have a point. Hear me out. In a prior life, I worked with a company providing VoIP phone systems for companies to bypass the traditional telecom system. One of our biggest issues (somewhat mitigated since in the last few years as I understand) that we encountered in deployments was the ridiculous variability in latency, which is tiny for web browsing but horrible for real-time communications.
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that. Otherwise, yeah, it's Comcrap looking to rake in more bucks. Yawn.
I guess your business model didn't consider the possibility that ISP's would oversell local bandwidth, and not spend any money building out more capacity.
The only thing I think I would consider prioritizing would be 911 calls. They're usually important.
And that is small compared to the price of housing here. Wish I could get Wave. I still have dialup at home.
....They do kinda have a point. Hear me out. In a prior life, I worked with a company providing VoIP phone systems for companies to bypass the traditional telecom system. One of our biggest issues (somewhat mitigated since in the last few years as I understand) that we encountered in deployments was the ridiculous variability in latency, which is tiny for web browsing but horrible for real-time communications.
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
This argument makes no logical sense because in your case you were using the public Internet to provide service over domains you had little to no control over.
This is not what Comcast is doing. They are hosting unique services on their own network from within their own administrative domain towards the customer.
If the ISP is providing telephone service over the customer's Internet infrastructure then there are no issues here because the customer's router can do QoS to prioritize whatever traffic they want and it WILL work.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that.
As Admiral Ackbar would say...
He who has the gold, rules.
To my mind, consumers and technical users alike would LOVE to be able to pay to prioritize traffic to specific sites of interest.
However to my mind, if you were going to abide by a network neutrality principal, it would mean you could pay for network prioritization for ANY website of your choosing. So a consumer could prioritize traffic to an Anime site, or Netflix, or linux distros.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anything that is not TV is specialized. And come to think of it, TV is specialized as well.
if comcast could squeeze more money out of its subscribers and/or the web sites and services they use.
DSL isn't the same as ADSLv2+ or COAX.
I have 50 different ISPs available to me, but for wired internet, there are really only 2. AT&T or Comcast.
I currently pay $110/month for a 15/3 Mbps Comcast connection.
I checked and get get GigE to the house for $499/month + $800 installation fee.
Because of distance, DSL is in the 1.5M / 384k bps range. That is what most of the ISPs riding on AT&T's connection offer, for about $10 more a month than AT&T. It isn't worth $120/yr extra not to deal with AT&T.
I have ZERO interest in u-verse, which is required to get ADSL v2+ service here. Also, AT&T isn't legally required to make this service available to 3rd parties, so they won't.
There was hope that Google Fibre would bring competition, but that only works for the 20,000 homes that actually get it. If you are 2 blocks from Google Fibre's planned areas - expect $500/month.
Why? Because they can.
The United States Supports Ban On Steel Tariffs, Except For 'National Security'
Anonymous Coward Supports Ban On Monopolies, Except For 'Public Utilities'
we can do this all day.
any service that an outside company pays Comcast to provide to it's customers. Ergo, there is no paid prioritization except from the people who have paid for prioritization. Checkmate. ;)
NO COLLUSION!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You literally described the entire point of QoS, which is not at all the same thing as paid prioritization. Upstream providers will absolutely honor QoS if you work out that arrangement with them, usually by paying a little extra. Paid prioritization has absolutely nothing to do with that.
I _currently_ work for a company selling VOIP services over the public internet, and this is exactly what we do. It works exactly as designed and there are absolutely no problems with it because we designed our entire model around the way the technology was designed to work in the first place.
... Comcast supports a ban on paid prioritization, as long as they can circumvent the ban?
Yeah, real effective ban you got there.
This is a wedge designed to divide us. After all, you’re right, of course; there are VERY good arguments to be made for allowing exceptions. The real problem here is that they’re trying to convince people that supporting Net Neutrality means we can’t have all those nice things, thus making anyone who supports Net Neutrality appear to be an unreasonable person.
For example, the fast lane that Pai has been trumpeting is telemedicine, which, like VoIP, is sensitive to spikes in latency. He’s been suggesting that repealing the 2015 regulations will finally allow telemedicine to take off. After all, the 2015 regulations were holding it back because they disallowed all “fast lanes”.
Except they didn’t.
The 2015 rules already carved out exceptions for certain services, telemedicine being one of them. And yet, I don’t recall any of us here on Slashdot suggesting that the 2015 regulations were anything other than Net Neutral, despite that apparent contradiction. Maybe there have been some Net Neutrality purists crying in a corner somewhere?
Anyway, what Comcast and Pai are trying to do is suggest that Net Neutrality is mutually exclusive with common sense that any normal person would agree with. It’s not. The 2015 regulations already showed us that we don’t have to give up on Net Neutrality to allow for exceptions that simply make sense.
This isn’t an either/or decision. We can have our cake and eat it too.
But they don't have a point. Nowhere in that need is there any valid reason for Comcast to charge VoIP providers money for doing so. Prioritizing VoIP is fine. Charging money for that prioritization to companies that they compete with is per se an antitrust violation right off the bat, because it means that those companies have to pay for not having their service degraded to levels below the speed that Comcast's service automatically gets effectively for free.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a solution. Do not bypass the traditional telecom system. Or are you saying that your call to a sexline is more Important than me looking up how to save my mums life when she had an attack.
And what if I find a way to do internet over VoiP? Would I get priority?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Comcast Corporate Speak: Let us double dip and force paid prioritization, but we'll only do it with limited services restricted to all the things we wanted paid prioritization for in the first place.
Like Netflix.
Except you're then giving the ISP preference over other VOIP and streaming video services. Would an ISP pay for its own prioritized VOIP/video? Would Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/etc? Would a new startup VOIP/video service be able to pay for that for all ISPs looking to get their it-would-be-a-shame-if-something-happened-to-your-stream money?
The only thing I could see "prioritized" would be VOIP calls to emergency services, but that should be included in the cost of the VOIP plan.
Comcast wants an exception that is basically a free pass for anything they want to prioritize, since comcast isn't everywhere and in fact carefully fails to compete with any but one other in any given city or region nothing will be "available to the entire internet."
And of course they explicitly want to be able to make sure their own video and voip solutions outperform other options cord cutters using their internet have available. Under this exemption Comcast could toss video streams in a bucket, using 19 slots in a row for your neighbors with their cable leaving only one for any and all other video streams like Netflix, Vue, Hulu Live, Sling, etc.
This is why corporations are trying to complicate the rules, They say that they want a specialized service exemption which might happen in the future and what they mean is that the next netflix protocol implementation might be labeled as a specialized service.
Take a look at the entire legal system as implemented in most western based countries. The reliance on case law means that laws cannot get any simpler, only more complex. This skews the legal system to the people who can afford good lawyers and screws the rest of us, this is by design and its implementation is proceeding as expected. We live in a world where most people break the law every day and they don't know it because no one is able to understand the laws they live under. The end result is that the ruling class can lock up anyone at any time for speaking out of line.
Bull. Fucking, Shit.
First of all, Comcast, focus on one lie at a time. Maybe you could concentrate on fixing your trash service and billing practices first, so that you aren't selling people lies.
Before you sell them bigger ideological lies.
Second, no they don't.
You clearly have no god damn idea what you are talking about and the fact that this shitty ignorant post got a 5 interesting just shows how far away from actual tech people this site has gotten.
How about the pipe provider doesn't muck with the stream at all and the end devices determine the QoS? That's not what they are doing though. They are saying it's not your data stream since it's going over our pipes, you have to pay us to manage it and/or not muck with it. What if the water company said they would prioritize your water usage? Want water to wash your car, pay more for it.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.