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ISPs Blow Off Stanford Net Neutrality Hearing
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Apr 21, 2008 06:40 PM
from the if-we-can't-stack-the-room-we're-not-playing dept.
from the if-we-can't-stack-the-room-we're-not-playing dept.
eldavojohn writes "The FCC & Stanford hoped to host an on-campus debate over Net Neutrality and invited AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner to take part. None of them showed up. Unfortunately, only one side of the issue was voiced despite Stanford being home to people opposing Net Neutrality. At the hearing, the FCC Commissioner stated: 'Consumers have come to expect and will continue to demand the open and neutral character that has always been the hallmark of the Internet. The Commission is currently examining several petitions and complaints according to which broadband providers have intentionally and secretly degraded applications in a way that undermines the open and interconnected character of the Internet.'"
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Your Rights Online: Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic 537 comments
FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
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Should I stop holding my breath? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Should I stop holding my breath? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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I would think that the ISP's would be on their best behavior until after the elections.
Check ComCast, /. has done a number of items about them throttling P2P applications.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Insightful)
See, and there you go... (Score:4, Interesting)
About the only right humans have in the so called "society" we live in, is the right to freely contract (read, associate and exchange value and come to agreements with others). Everything from sales, purchases, to marrying someone or letting a rapist have his way with you, it is ALL contracts. Accords, agreements, even when you surrender to a bad guy, you've agreed to let him have his way. All things boil down to that. So enforce your contract. You bought 5 megs down 1 meg up, unrestricted internet access. Period. Enforce it. Take them up for violation of contract, there are remarkable collections processes available. Hell, a smart and asshole type individual willing to take it far enough, and with a stomach for leaving lots of people unemployed (whom I'd actually wager DESERVE it) could end up owning Cox@home
Parent
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You're not a lawyer are you? There are literally hundreds of laws limiting the freedoms that you claim. For example you can't sell Brooklyn Bridge, purchase a slave, marry your sister, and have sex while queuing at L
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How is that going to help anyone if Comcast decides to only allow users to connect to their "partner" websites? Sure, I can switch to AT&T here, I'm sure THEY won't follow-the-leader (Prediction: Comcast will partner with yahoo, ATT with alta vista). We've already heard what Bell Canada is doing to all of the independent ISPs who thought the solution to shitty internet providers was to make their own ISPs... you've got to hook to "the internet" somewhere, goo
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Sounds like hyperbole, but I'll tell you this much: there'll be rioting in the streets long before that happens -- and I'll be one of the ones with the hand grenades.
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Sounds like hyperbole, but I'll tell you this much: there'll be rioting in the streets long before that happens -- and I'll be one of the ones with the hand grenades.
Hah! Isn't that the very thing that was said about DRM? DRM didn't see massive consumer protests, but instead was killed off as the costs of keeping up with those cracking DRM became untenable. With Internet, though, the situation is different. Unlike the entertainment industry, the ISPs are usually in a monopoly or duopoly market, and aren't subject to the same market forces as the music and movie industries. Without competition, the ISPs' will always be able to hang a sword of Damocles over the cont
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Sure, but who's going to foot the bill for that? The problem with utopian/anarchistic ideas: it works only so long as it's small. Once it gets big, then someone takes advantage of it. Not happening, slick.
Re:Should I stop holding my breath? (Score:5, Insightful)
Legislation on issues such as this would only allow for one more possible point of corruption for the big interests who want to break the rules. I'm not sure which government has jurisdiction over 'the internet' anyway. Does it only apply to your customers if you're an american company? Or only your customers? Are your customers anyone who pays you money, or anyone that does business with anyone who pays you money? What if they're outside the US? What exactly are they going to regulate anyway... traffic between any two hosts? Traffic on a particular network? Is that network considered to be of a subnet as defined by an IP Mask? Perhaps of an ownership block? Maybe it's a trail of routes. Even if we are unfortunate enough to have the government step in and force people to act more communist, the law has to be enforcible and there has to be a method of clearly showing tort anyway in court. It also has to appear in a court of appropriate jurisdiction. That last bit might be the hardest part of the whole idea to swallow.
For Net-Neutrality to have some kind of effect, you have to show that some party violated some rule, and that some body of enforcement has jurisdiction over the issue. If you can't answer every one of these questions about every incident then you can just only point and cry foul every time someone snuffs a packet out. As if our legal system wasn't muddy enough already. Next thing you know it'll be illegal to have personal and corporate firewalls.
Parent
Re:Should I stop holding my breath? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is, I understand, how common carrier status works. AFAICT, the telecoms are trying to have their cake and eat it too, by inspecting and interfering but maintaining immunity.
Parent
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Even government owned roads have restrictions on the types of vehicles that can ride on them. Let's not even mention those that can only be traveled with a certain number of pass
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so, then, what's the incentive to own the wire then if you cannot use it for your own purposes?
You do use it for your own purposes. Specifically, it pays your bills because you are able to lease the use of that wire for significantly more than it cost to lay and the occasional engineer out if it gets broken. This is how the "traditional" (pre-Net Neutrality) ISP business model works.
The big question is: Now that the technology exists to prioritise traffic along that wire according to any one of a hundred different metrics, is it significantly better for society if legislation is passed to make suc
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People might be tempted to say that we should then have the government take over and do it all, but even in cases where the government does take over, you still have traffic laws (see roads, vehicle restrictions, tolls, and HOV lanes.)
Flamebait? Parent makes good points. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What excellent points? The grandparent conveniently ignores the fact that, for many people, Comcast is their only option for high-speed internet access. All the encryption and routing tricks in the world won't help these people if Comcast simply refuses to transfer packets going to certain destinations.
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Too slow with untrustworthy exit points...wait didn't I read this before somewhere? Damn broken records...
What cave have you been hiding in anyway? Encrypted traffic gets heavily throttl
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Re:Should I stop holding my breath? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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FCC claims authority over internet (Score:3, Informative)
They don't claim light, but I guess fiber optic cables would loosely fall under "cable". Nor do they claim authority over intrastate traffic.
they have other plans (Score:5, Insightful)
FTC and the definition of "Internet Access" (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar to:
"USDA Organic"
Or
"This product has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."
Yes, if it's to be regulated it's an F*T*C job. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that the issue is a proper job for the FTC, not the FCC.
Network neutrality can mean "Treat all packets the same." Or it can mean "Don't favor one player's packets over anothers'."
There are valid, pro-consumer reasons to give some packets different treatment than others. One of the biggest: Streams and file transfers have very different requirements for good service. Optimizing routing for one
who regulates ISPs? (Score:2)
I agree that the issue is a proper job for the FTC, not the FCC.
Why the FTC and not FCC? Afterall they are the Federal "Trade" Commission and the Federal "Communications" Commission. While trade takes place on the net, the net is all about communications.
So the real issues of "Network Neutrality" is anticompetitive and rent-seeking
It already is anticompetitive. Forgetting the fact that telcoms and cablecos already got hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars to upgrade their networks, but didn't
Re: (Score:2)
web only access / internet accesss. what the heck did you expect? web access is internet access. do you even pretend to know what you are talking about?
labels dont do crap. And they wont help the consumer. sorry. Look at labels for harddrives; they dont tell you much at all.. whats a gig these days?
george carlin said it best; labels are just things schmu
Well, why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they don't show up . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Couple of comments to that effect from the head of the FCC, and I'll betcha they'll all be at the next conference.
Re:If they don't show up . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
. . . they obviously don't believe that pretty little college debates are going to have anything to do with the outcome, and don't think the FCC chief is going to have much more. There's a pretty good chance they're right.
Parent
If they actually had a valid position... (Score:3, Insightful)
Memories? (Score:3, Interesting)
win by default (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:win by default (Score:5, Insightful)
If that happened, they would likely sue blah blah blah unfair hearing etcetera. I don't think I have to spell out what would happen if the FCC gave "they didn't show up to a debate at a college" as their reason.
That said, I expect that Stanford was going to have a properly moderated and timed debate on the issue. That's about as fair of a discussion on the subject as you can get, and that's exactly why the ISPs did not show up. Fairness is neither in their favor nor their business practices.
Parent
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And meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Add your voice (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2008/04/21/sen-kerry-i-need-your-feedback-on-net-neutrality/ [savetheinternet.com]
https://secure.freepress.net/site/Advocacy?alertId=103&pg=makeACall [freepress.net]
Gee (Score:5, Interesting)
Who? (Score:2)
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
last-mile ISPs suck (Score:2)
Then maybe we could have had some industry insights from major Internet backbone companies who aren't monopoly scum saying sensible things instead of whatever lawyer-hobbled stuff an at&t rep would have been able to say.
Telecoms to consumers: We don't care (Score:2)
Comcast & the P2P blocking side effects (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in late '06 and early to mid '07, I would use P2P to download some music very sparingly. It always worked and would complete in a matter of minutes/hours with no side effects. I remember first seeing news of the Comcast P2P blocking in the Summer of '07, but it never affected me when I would use Bittorrent. However, one day in September of '07, a couple friends of mine were over and one of them wanted to watch a show. He logged into a torrent tracker that he's a member of and we started downloading a couple episodes. One finished, but the other one froze and would not transfer at all. Actually, at this point my entire Internet connection was dead and I couldn't even browse websites! After about 30 minutes, the Internet connection returned... mostly. I could do most things on the Internet, but strangely enough my Vonage VoIP phone line was dead. If I tried starting a Bittorrent download, the entire Internet connection would die again for about 30 minutes. If I rebooted the Vonage router (gateway router for our home network), the Internet connection would remain dead for 30 minutes then come back, but the Vonage line stayed dead.
Of course, a call to Comcast's tech support line was not helpful at all. They denied that it was due to P2P blocking and sent me on my merry way. At this point I didn't have enough evidence to argue to the contrary, so I tried troubleshooting it with Vonage.
Since the Internet connection was working again and only the Vonage line had problems, I guessed that the Vonage router had somehow been damaged. Vonage tech support logged into the router, could communicate with it, but it just wasn't able to connect to their servers to establish a VoIP phone line connection. I ended up sending them the router back and got a replacement, which worked and gave me VoIP connectivity again immediately.
Fast forward to November. I try another P2P download and sure enough, the Internet connection dies again! Same thing... 30 minutes later, everything returns except for my VoIP line. Now, I'm pissed because I know it's Comcast. What if I needed to dial 911? As a side effect of their P2P blocking, they blocked my ability to dial anybody, including 911, from my home phone. 3 days later, the VoIP line inexplicably returns.
I'm a network engineer by day, grad student and dad by evening/night. I would have hooked up another PC with sniffing software on it to further troubleshoot the problem but I simply didn't have time to do so. With the information I have, it is obvious that Comcast was doing something to my Internet connection. It is highly unlikely that the Vonage routers were the problem. Let's review the facts:
- Router #1 worked for a year with P2P downloads.
- Then Comcast hits the news sites about blocking P2P.
- Then I try P2P download, my connection gets screwy and my Vonage phone line dies for a week.
- Two months later I try another P2P download with a different, newly shipped Vonage router and the exact same thing happens!
A month or so later, I read that Comcast was backing off on their P2P blocking a bit so I try another download. Finally, it's back to normal like in '06 and early '07; the download worked and there were no side effects. However, the whole experience of not having a usable home phone line for a total of 1.5 weeks left me quite bitter and I switched ISPs to Verizon Fios the week that it became available here. When the FCC had that comments page up for the Comcast P2P blocking investigation, I posted my story on there as well. From what I under
Re: (Score:2)
Government granted monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
There possibly, might be *one* alternative, but it's complicated and gene
Re:Government granted monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
the government *could* bid out such monopolies to companies based on who guarantees the best service/price ratio.
Or government could separate ownership of infrastructure from ownership of those who provide services the infrastructure can provide and require the owner to allow open access.
FalconParent
Re: (Score:2)
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The government's sole responsibility is to collect money from you as taxes.
And to spend them on $449 toilet seats and $1 trillion on a war only 28% of people approve.