So limiting free speech is OK if the object of regulation somehow fits in the category of "news agency?" If I operate a blog and call it a "news" site, does that make it acceptable for the FCC ot force me to offer equal time to "both sides"?
There is no such thing as absolute truth. A news article that I believe to be perfectly balanced may strike you as blatantly biased. I, for one, would rather decide for myself whether a news agency is credible instead of having some unelected bureaucrat make that call.
You might want to read up on a concept we've got called Private Property. Bans on smoking in buildings owned by government? Fine by me. But dictating to an owner of private property that emitting certain types of smoke is illegal goes against the concept of autonomy and ownership.
And don't even try the "But employees have a right to a smoke-free workplace!" line. It's simply not a justification for using the coercive power of the state. Should cops have a right to not worry about being shot? Should garbage collectors not have to deal with stinky decaying waste all day? If you choose to work in a bar, or a restaurant that allows smoking, then you are knowingly assuming some level of risk.
But the alternatives to Comcast are slower, and they have much more latency! It's my right as a consumer to have an ISP that's fast, affordable, neutral, and offers good service.
Government must force companies to give consumers what they desire. That's why government exists--to ensure that when some consumers don't like a good or service being offered, regulators can intervene to protect our right to use Bittorrent free from any throttling or limitation.
Come on. Yes, life without broadband is unimaginable to most Slashdotters (myself included) but the fact is that milions of Americans choose to go without broadband, even despite the fact that its available to them for what most of us would consider a very affordable price. As the Pew Center's recent survey demonstrated, while many people wish they could get broadband, there are still a lot of people out there who don't value it as much.
Remember, just fifteen years ago pretty much nobody had Internet, and we got by fine. Shopping was more of a hassle, and you had to look things up in paper encyclopedias, etc. But unlike young people who grew up online, there's a whole generation of Americans for whom the Internet isn't all that essential.
Someday, Internet may well deserve to be classified as a utility. But, like cable TV, it remains a convenient luxury. There are things you can't do without broadband at home, but for a lot of people broadband is just really not a very high priority.
Choice is a very good thing, but achieving it through forced structural separation has an ugly downside.
What would you do if the government forced you to let competitors use your pipes at wholesale rates? Even with rate of return protections, the incentive to invest big bucks in building better pipes is greatly diminished when your competitors reap all the benefits of your investment without any of the risk. While I love CLECs as much as the next person, I wonder if there'd be more VRADs and DSLAMs if forced openness weren't the law.
Why is there just one phone company and one cable company in most areas? Cleary, it doesn't have to be that way. Overbuilding is already happening in some places like Chicago and DC. RCN has built a cable network from the ground up entirely in neighborhoods where an incumbent already exists. It feels great to ditch Comcast for a cheaper cable company.
Natural monopolies do exist, but it's unclear if last-mile networks meet the definition. The main reason it looks that way so often is because of greedy municipal franchise boards that force new entrants to essentially sell their souls to the devil. "Want to bring service to our town? Fine," they say, "give us 10 percent of gross revenue and promise to give service to everybody within 5 years. Otherwise, hit the road, even if it means residents are stuck with too few choices."
What if most people don't share your preferences as consumers? Sure, most Slashdotters are fine with pay-per-bit, if it means no application discrimination. But we're a narrow subset of all ISP subscribers.
But I prefer a low-cost ISP that doesn't impose a unit cost on bandwidth use, even if it means some of my Bittorrent TCP streams are reset. What right does the FCC have to dictate that no company can provide it to me?
There's infinite demand for bandwidth but finite network resources. If you can't throttle, you've got to price per bit--otherwise, everybody pays more because the ISPs have to upgrade to satiate extreme users. And believe me, there are people out there (like myself) who'd gladly pull in terabytes were it not for monthly usage caps.
ISPs should duke it out and battle for customers by experimenting with varying methods of managing congestion. Maybe metered pricing will prevail, or maybe a different pricing mechanism that has yet to be conceived.
We can criticize an ISP's practices, and sue it for fraud, but banning protocol discrimination because it violates some sacred principle means fewer choices in the end.
Alcoholics Anonymous, the renowned 12-step program that directs problem drinkers to seek help from a higher power, says it's not a religion and is open to nonbelievers. But it has enough religious overtones that a parolee can't be ordered to attend its meetings as a condition of staying out of prison, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
In fact, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering a parolee to go through rehabilitation at Alcoholics Anonymous or an affiliated program for drug addicts.
Exactly, it's not like a Court has to give Google the right to examine its own logs. If Viacom-owned IP addresses were uploading Viacom's IP to YouTube, don't you think Google would have pointed that out by now in its lawsuit?
The real issue is that without access to some of YouTube's logs, Viacom has no way of knowing if Google knowingly contributed to copyright infringement, and that question is central to Google's Safe Harbor defense.
I agree that YouTube is an excellent way to popularize Viacom's content, but that's not the only business concern of relevance here.
Viacom wants to use YouTube-esque short clips of its videos as a revenue source. And, if Google's employees are uploading infringing content, then YouTube may be actively hampering Viacom's ability to earn ad revenue from its original works. Comedy Central, for example, offers years of Daily Show, Colbert Report, and South Park clips that are supported by ads. YouTube is likely limiting Viacom's ability to capitalize on its intellectual property by substituting for Viacom's in-house video service. That is textbook copyright infringement.
Agreed. When an ISP makes a bone-headed move, like using NebuAd, it gets a lot of bad press and has a strong competitive incentive to say sorry and fix its mistake.
I'm a lot more concerned about government invading my privacy than my ISP. You can always sue a company, but thanks to qualified immunity, government agents can break the law and get away scot-free.
Now there is a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Grassley, to force online retailers to inform the government of every online credit card transaction. You can't opt-out of govermment data collection, and you can't just "take your business someplace else."
The Senate's first priority should be taking a close look at the privacy implications of the REAL ID, the national fingerprint registry, the FBI's DNA database, and warrantless surveillance.
If you want to use 2 ISPs for redundancy and load-balancing, why not get ADSL and Cable instead of 2xADSL lines? Chances are both of your DSL lines would face many of the same failure points, so if one went down the other one would be at risk too. Even if you used different CLECs for service on each line, the lines would still probably traverse the same colocation facility, although you'd get somewhat more redundancy.
In our small business, we have both business Cable broadband and a T1 line. We use the Cisco 1825 Router which has dual WAN interfaces and very robust load-balancing capabilities. Setting up an old box to load-balance two ISPs will be a huge pain in the ass, so you might be better off with a preconfigured off-the-shelf solution.
Also, where are you finding ADSL providers that don't offer declining per-megabit rates? http://www.covad.com/web/services/broadband/business_dsl.html Covad DSL charges more for dual 3mbps connections than a single 15mbps connection. You might check your math again to make sure getting two slow ADSL connections isn't a lot less speed per dollar than a single fast connection.
OpenWRT and Tomato feature impressive QoS capabilities as well.
L7-filter can even manage traffic at the application layer. Just set Bittorrent to "Bulk" and put Skype and Xbox live as "Premium."
Managing traffic on the router level is a lot easier than on the PC level, especially when you have several devices on a single network competing for scarce bandwidth.
Comcast offers Giganews which is amazing--but Comcast caps it at a measly 2 GB/mo.
If you want cheap, unlimited news with good bandwidth, get Newshosting @ $14.95 a month and 80 days retention.
If you want the best news money can buy, Giganews Diamond with SSL encryption @ $29.95 a month and 200 days retention.
Sure as hell beats Netflix, or Cable TV, or Hulu, or DVDs. Even better, those dirty Hollywood content producers don't see a dime.
if you like to read the news and are willing to pay fifteen bucks a month for it, you can access a massive library of over one thousand HD movies. I can download a 720p H.264 movie with 5.1 audio in under 40 minutes, maxing out my 16mbps connection at a constant 2030 KB/s. Each film is about 4.5GB and looks absolutely excellent on my LCD TV.
Beats Bittorrent any day in my opinion. No seeding issues, no lawsuits, no packet throttling. And if you're willing to settle for standard def, you can literally download a movie in the time it takes you to make popcorn and grab a beer.
you're wrong, the TV will work just fine for years to come. its ability to receive analog signals (arguably not a major function of the TV) will be diminished when broadcasters stop transmitting in analog. but all other uses of the TV will work, and any analog TV sold today is compatible with a digital OTA receiver which are both available and government-subsidizaed.
According to the link you posted, the top 10% of earners (greater than $103,912 a year) earn 46.44%
of aggregate gross income, but pay 70.30% of total federal income tax receipts. Seems pretty unfair to me.
Also, the bottom 50% (earning below $30,881) earn 12.83% of income but pay a mere 3.07% of taxes.
I make $29k a year so I suppose I shouldn't complain, but someday I hope to make six figures and I am not looking forward to paying 1 of 3 dollars I earn to the government.
Wait, you're arguing that browsers shouldn't be free? I thought lower prices are supposed to be a good thing. Nowadays we have great browsers like Firefox and Opera that are free, and Microsoft deserves some credit for setting a precedent that browsers should not have a price tag.
Also, if Microsoft can't bundle IE with Windows, then everybody who buys Windows will have to download an internet browser before browsing the web. No big deal for a savvy user, but plenty of people like how Windows has Internet built-in. In fact, I personally would rather Windows include more free programs, not fewer ones. I like having a basic browser, media player, word processor, and even solitaire all built in to Windows. Sure you could argue that if Windows didn't have any of these programs, then the market for them would be more thriving. So should we force MS to dismantle Windows to a shell of what it currently is?
If MS actually prevented Windows users from switching to Firefox, that would be monopoly abuse. But Microsoft does nothing to stop you from replacing or augmenting their built-in programs with other third-party software. People who don't want to deal with finding an OS can just browse the web, and those who want something better can grab Firefox or Opera.
You raise an important point: What about web advertising in a world where ISPs charge for usage? The main revenue source for countless great websites, including this one, is advertising. The worst thing for content creators who rely on banner clicks would be for AdBlock to become ubiquitous--which it would become were ISPs to make customers pay based on how much data was trasnferred.
Discouraging casual browsing and ads via tiered pricing may inhibit the expansion of the Internet, both as a medium for commerce and a source of valuable information.
AMD has some great low-end chips, but Intel has taken over every other market segment in performance. AMD remains viable only in the sub-$75 range. Intel's $75 E2140 can hit 3Ghz easily, running circles around a $75 Athlon X2 4400+, no matter how good of an OC you get from the Athlon. Intel's Core 2 chips have much more OC headroom and much better performance per dollar all the way from the $75 E2140 to the $1000 QX9650.
Fines on company "x" only get passed on to customers who choose to remain with that company despite higher prices. If Comcast gets fined and jacks up rates, they will have to hike prices. There will be an exodus of customers to competitors like DSL, Fiber, 3G, WiMax, and possibly even satellite or dedicated lines. The loss of customers will greatly hurt profitability, causing a huge stock price drop and much lower executive compensation which is tied to earnings per share usually.
Stateful packet inspection of encrypted traffic is functional only if it can distinguish infringing applications from legitimate ones. Bittorrent has an obvious traffic pattern--a dead give-away to network management tools like Sandvine, even if protocol encryption is used.
But NNTP via SSL? Or Bittorrent over VPN? Or SSH? How can ISPs possibly limit such uses without impeding lots of core internet uses like remote business users connecting to their corporate IPSec VPN? The key to circumventing ISP limits on file sharing is mimicking legitimate encrypted traffic.
As long as ISPs can't tell the difference between business SSH/SSL/VPN traffic from coypright infringment programs operating using the same ports, protocols, traffic patterns, and even application layer signatures, pirates have little to be concerned about. At worst, ISPs could charge a bit extra for users who wish to transmit encrypted traffic.
What right does the FCC have to tell Comcast it can't control more than 30% of the market? Sure, Comcast isn't the greatest cable company in the U.S., but is better than most. What about the millions of people suffering under Mediacom or Charter? I bet they'd gladly take Comcast over their current crap provider (and rumor has it Comcast has even considered buying out smaller rivals) Small regional cable companies like Mediacom and Charter offer terrible programming and mediocre service compared to Comcast -- But thanks to the FCC , millions are stuck with idiotic companies.
Comcast isn't perfect. They limit Bittorrent seeding and they have invisi-caps, albeit much higher than Cox's. Yet, their 16/1 broadband for $52.95/month is actually a decent offering, especially compared to DSL's abysmal speeds for 95% of Americans.
Comcast's video service is pretty solid and it's improved a lot in the past few years, aside from occassional glitches and buggy DVR software. Not as many HD channels as satellite, but compared to even TimeWarner, Comcast has impressive HD On-demand using Switched Digital Video, good promotional pricing, and now that they're upgrading to 1Ghz systems Comcast is starting to offer 30 or 40 HD channels in some areas.
It's not like Comcast is even close to being able to exert monopoly power for any of the services they offer. This is because so many substitutes exist -- for video, there's Satellite, broadcast, U-verse, Fios, streaming sites like YouTube, iTunes/iPod, cell phone video. For internet, there's Wi-Max, 3G, EDGE, DSL, Dial-Up, and Dedicated Lines.
MAYBE if Comcast had so much power they could jack up prices exorbitantly without getting eaten alive by competition, then the FCC would have a case. But as it is, the FCC's decision is dead wrong. The ruling marks yet another by Kevin Martin to hurt the cable companies and help the telco companies. I wonder if there's some ulterior motive to Martin's seemingly anti-cable, pro-telco agenda as of late? Either way, thanks to the FCC, consumers lose.
Slashdot Mirror
So limiting free speech is OK if the object of regulation somehow fits in the category of "news agency?" If I operate a blog and call it a "news" site, does that make it acceptable for the FCC ot force me to offer equal time to "both sides"? There is no such thing as absolute truth. A news article that I believe to be perfectly balanced may strike you as blatantly biased. I, for one, would rather decide for myself whether a news agency is credible instead of having some unelected bureaucrat make that call.
You might want to read up on a concept we've got called Private Property. Bans on smoking in buildings owned by government? Fine by me. But dictating to an owner of private property that emitting certain types of smoke is illegal goes against the concept of autonomy and ownership. And don't even try the "But employees have a right to a smoke-free workplace!" line. It's simply not a justification for using the coercive power of the state. Should cops have a right to not worry about being shot? Should garbage collectors not have to deal with stinky decaying waste all day? If you choose to work in a bar, or a restaurant that allows smoking, then you are knowingly assuming some level of risk.
But the alternatives to Comcast are slower, and they have much more latency! It's my right as a consumer to have an ISP that's fast, affordable, neutral, and offers good service.
Government must force companies to give consumers what they desire. That's why government exists--to ensure that when some consumers don't like a good or service being offered, regulators can intervene to protect our right to use Bittorrent free from any throttling or limitation.
The Bill of Rights protects us from government, not private actors, and for good reason.
When a company screws us, it loses money and eventually goes bankrupt. When government screws us, there's not a lot you can do.
Come on. Yes, life without broadband is unimaginable to most Slashdotters (myself included) but the fact is that milions of Americans choose to go without broadband, even despite the fact that its available to them for what most of us would consider a very affordable price. As the Pew Center's recent survey demonstrated, while many people wish they could get broadband, there are still a lot of people out there who don't value it as much.
Remember, just fifteen years ago pretty much nobody had Internet, and we got by fine. Shopping was more of a hassle, and you had to look things up in paper encyclopedias, etc. But unlike young people who grew up online, there's a whole generation of Americans for whom the Internet isn't all that essential.
Someday, Internet may well deserve to be classified as a utility. But, like cable TV, it remains a convenient luxury. There are things you can't do without broadband at home, but for a lot of people broadband is just really not a very high priority.
Choice is a very good thing, but achieving it through forced structural separation has an ugly downside.
What would you do if the government forced you to let competitors use your pipes at wholesale rates? Even with rate of return protections, the incentive to invest big bucks in building better pipes is greatly diminished when your competitors reap all the benefits of your investment without any of the risk. While I love CLECs as much as the next person, I wonder if there'd be more VRADs and DSLAMs if forced openness weren't the law.
Why is there just one phone company and one cable company in most areas? Cleary, it doesn't have to be that way. Overbuilding is already happening in some places like Chicago and DC. RCN has built a cable network from the ground up entirely in neighborhoods where an incumbent already exists. It feels great to ditch Comcast for a cheaper cable company.
Natural monopolies do exist, but it's unclear if last-mile networks meet the definition. The main reason it looks that way so often is because of greedy municipal franchise boards that force new entrants to essentially sell their souls to the devil. "Want to bring service to our town? Fine," they say, "give us 10 percent of gross revenue and promise to give service to everybody within 5 years. Otherwise, hit the road, even if it means residents are stuck with too few choices."
What if most people don't share your preferences as consumers? Sure, most Slashdotters are fine with pay-per-bit, if it means no application discrimination. But we're a narrow subset of all ISP subscribers. But I prefer a low-cost ISP that doesn't impose a unit cost on bandwidth use, even if it means some of my Bittorrent TCP streams are reset. What right does the FCC have to dictate that no company can provide it to me? There's infinite demand for bandwidth but finite network resources. If you can't throttle, you've got to price per bit--otherwise, everybody pays more because the ISPs have to upgrade to satiate extreme users. And believe me, there are people out there (like myself) who'd gladly pull in terabytes were it not for monthly usage caps. ISPs should duke it out and battle for customers by experimenting with varying methods of managing congestion. Maybe metered pricing will prevail, or maybe a different pricing mechanism that has yet to be conceived. We can criticize an ISP's practices, and sue it for fraud, but banning protocol discrimination because it violates some sacred principle means fewer choices in the end.
Alcoholics Anonymous, the renowned 12-step program that directs problem drinkers to seek help from a higher power, says it's not a religion and is open to nonbelievers. But it has enough religious overtones that a parolee can't be ordered to attend its meetings as a condition of staying out of prison, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
In fact, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering a parolee to go through rehabilitation at Alcoholics Anonymous or an affiliated program for drug addicts.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/08/BA99S1AKQ.DTL
Exactly, it's not like a Court has to give Google the right to examine its own logs. If Viacom-owned IP addresses were uploading Viacom's IP to YouTube, don't you think Google would have pointed that out by now in its lawsuit? The real issue is that without access to some of YouTube's logs, Viacom has no way of knowing if Google knowingly contributed to copyright infringement, and that question is central to Google's Safe Harbor defense.
I agree that YouTube is an excellent way to popularize Viacom's content, but that's not the only business concern of relevance here.
Viacom wants to use YouTube-esque short clips of its videos as a revenue source. And, if Google's employees are uploading infringing content, then YouTube may be actively hampering Viacom's ability to earn ad revenue from its original works. Comedy Central, for example, offers years of Daily Show, Colbert Report, and South Park clips that are supported by ads. YouTube is likely limiting Viacom's ability to capitalize on its intellectual property by substituting for Viacom's in-house video service. That is textbook copyright infringement.
There are plenty of highly anonymous VPN/SSL tunneling services available for 10 or 15 bucks a month. No need to take a speed hit or trust an unknown foreign proxy server. -Steganos https://www.steganos.com/us/products/home-office/internet-anonym-vpn/overview/ -VPNGates http://www.vpngates.com/ -SecureIX http://www.secureix.com/ -Relakks https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb -Anonymizer http://www.anonymizer.com/
Agreed. When an ISP makes a bone-headed move, like using NebuAd, it gets a lot of bad press and has a strong competitive incentive to say sorry and fix its mistake.
I'm a lot more concerned about government invading my privacy than my ISP. You can always sue a company, but thanks to qualified immunity, government agents can break the law and get away scot-free.
Now there is a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Grassley, to force online retailers to inform the government of every online credit card transaction. You can't opt-out of govermment data collection, and you can't just "take your business someplace else."
The Senate's first priority should be taking a close look at the privacy implications of the REAL ID, the national fingerprint registry, the FBI's DNA database, and warrantless surveillance.
In our small business, we have both business Cable broadband and a T1 line. We use the Cisco 1825 Router which has dual WAN interfaces and very robust load-balancing capabilities. Setting up an old box to load-balance two ISPs will be a huge pain in the ass, so you might be better off with a preconfigured off-the-shelf solution.
Also, where are you finding ADSL providers that don't offer declining per-megabit rates? http://www.covad.com/web/services/broadband/business_dsl.html
Covad DSL charges more for dual 3mbps connections than a single 15mbps connection. You might check your math again to make sure getting two slow ADSL connections isn't a lot less speed per dollar than a single fast connection.
OpenWRT and Tomato feature impressive QoS capabilities as well.
L7-filter can even manage traffic at the application layer. Just set Bittorrent to "Bulk" and put Skype and Xbox live as "Premium."
Managing traffic on the router level is a lot easier than on the PC level, especially when you have several devices on a single network competing for scarce bandwidth.
Comcast offers Giganews which is amazing--but Comcast caps it at a measly 2 GB/mo. If you want cheap, unlimited news with good bandwidth, get Newshosting @ $14.95 a month and 80 days retention. If you want the best news money can buy, Giganews Diamond with SSL encryption @ $29.95 a month and 200 days retention. Sure as hell beats Netflix, or Cable TV, or Hulu, or DVDs. Even better, those dirty Hollywood content producers don't see a dime.
Beats Bittorrent any day in my opinion. No seeding issues, no lawsuits, no packet throttling. And if you're willing to settle for standard def, you can literally download a movie in the time it takes you to make popcorn and grab a beer.
you're wrong, the TV will work just fine for years to come. its ability to receive analog signals (arguably not a major function of the TV) will be diminished when broadcasters stop transmitting in analog. but all other uses of the TV will work, and any analog TV sold today is compatible with a digital OTA receiver which are both available and government-subsidizaed.
According to the link you posted, the top 10% of earners (greater than $103,912 a year) earn 46.44% of aggregate gross income, but pay 70.30% of total federal income tax receipts. Seems pretty unfair to me. Also, the bottom 50% (earning below $30,881) earn 12.83% of income but pay a mere 3.07% of taxes. I make $29k a year so I suppose I shouldn't complain, but someday I hope to make six figures and I am not looking forward to paying 1 of 3 dollars I earn to the government.
ever heard of BTK killer?
Wait, you're arguing that browsers shouldn't be free? I thought lower prices are supposed to be a good thing. Nowadays we have great browsers like Firefox and Opera that are free, and Microsoft deserves some credit for setting a precedent that browsers should not have a price tag.
Also, if Microsoft can't bundle IE with Windows, then everybody who buys Windows will have to download an internet browser before browsing the web. No big deal for a savvy user, but plenty of people like how Windows has Internet built-in. In fact, I personally would rather Windows include more free programs, not fewer ones. I like having a basic browser, media player, word processor, and even solitaire all built in to Windows. Sure you could argue that if Windows didn't have any of these programs, then the market for them would be more thriving. So should we force MS to dismantle Windows to a shell of what it currently is?
If MS actually prevented Windows users from switching to Firefox, that would be monopoly abuse. But Microsoft does nothing to stop you from replacing or augmenting their built-in programs with other third-party software. People who don't want to deal with finding an OS can just browse the web, and those who want something better can grab Firefox or Opera.
You raise an important point: What about web advertising in a world where ISPs charge for usage? The main revenue source for countless great websites, including this one, is advertising. The worst thing for content creators who rely on banner clicks would be for AdBlock to become ubiquitous--which it would become were ISPs to make customers pay based on how much data was trasnferred. Discouraging casual browsing and ads via tiered pricing may inhibit the expansion of the Internet, both as a medium for commerce and a source of valuable information.
AMD has some great low-end chips, but Intel has taken over every other market segment in performance. AMD remains viable only in the sub-$75 range. Intel's $75 E2140 can hit 3Ghz easily, running circles around a $75 Athlon X2 4400+, no matter how good of an OC you get from the Athlon. Intel's Core 2 chips have much more OC headroom and much better performance per dollar all the way from the $75 E2140 to the $1000 QX9650.
Fines on company "x" only get passed on to customers who choose to remain with that company despite higher prices. If Comcast gets fined and jacks up rates, they will have to hike prices. There will be an exodus of customers to competitors like DSL, Fiber, 3G, WiMax, and possibly even satellite or dedicated lines. The loss of customers will greatly hurt profitability, causing a huge stock price drop and much lower executive compensation which is tied to earnings per share usually.
Stateful packet inspection of encrypted traffic is functional only if it can distinguish infringing applications from legitimate ones. Bittorrent has an obvious traffic pattern--a dead give-away to network management tools like Sandvine, even if protocol encryption is used.
But NNTP via SSL? Or Bittorrent over VPN? Or SSH? How can ISPs possibly limit such uses without impeding lots of core internet uses like remote business users connecting to their corporate IPSec VPN? The key to circumventing ISP limits on file sharing is mimicking legitimate encrypted traffic.
As long as ISPs can't tell the difference between business SSH/SSL/VPN traffic from coypright infringment programs operating using the same ports, protocols, traffic patterns, and even application layer signatures, pirates have little to be concerned about. At worst, ISPs could charge a bit extra for users who wish to transmit encrypted traffic.
What right does the FCC have to tell Comcast it can't control more than 30% of the market? Sure, Comcast isn't the greatest cable company in the U.S., but is better than most. What about the millions of people suffering under Mediacom or Charter? I bet they'd gladly take Comcast over their current crap provider (and rumor has it Comcast has even considered buying out smaller rivals) Small regional cable companies like Mediacom and Charter offer terrible programming and mediocre service compared to Comcast -- But thanks to the FCC , millions are stuck with idiotic companies.
Comcast isn't perfect. They limit Bittorrent seeding and they have invisi-caps, albeit much higher than Cox's. Yet, their 16/1 broadband for $52.95/month is actually a decent offering, especially compared to DSL's abysmal speeds for 95% of Americans.
Comcast's video service is pretty solid and it's improved a lot in the past few years, aside from occassional glitches and buggy DVR software. Not as many HD channels as satellite, but compared to even TimeWarner, Comcast has impressive HD On-demand using Switched Digital Video, good promotional pricing, and now that they're upgrading to 1Ghz systems Comcast is starting to offer 30 or 40 HD channels in some areas.
It's not like Comcast is even close to being able to exert monopoly power for any of the services they offer. This is because so many substitutes exist -- for video, there's Satellite, broadcast, U-verse, Fios, streaming sites like YouTube, iTunes/iPod, cell phone video. For internet, there's Wi-Max, 3G, EDGE, DSL, Dial-Up, and Dedicated Lines.
MAYBE if Comcast had so much power they could jack up prices exorbitantly without getting eaten alive by competition, then the FCC would have a case. But as it is, the FCC's decision is dead wrong. The ruling marks yet another by Kevin Martin to hurt the cable companies and help the telco companies. I wonder if there's some ulterior motive to Martin's seemingly anti-cable, pro-telco agenda as of late? Either way, thanks to the FCC, consumers lose.