Slashdot Log In
Comcast Appeals FCC's Net Neutrality Ruling
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Sep 04, 2008 05:12 PM
from the makes-one-long-for-tin-cans-and-string dept.
from the makes-one-long-for-tin-cans-and-string dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Comcast has filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling that says the company can't delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles. A Comcast VP said the FCC ruling is 'legally inappropriate,' but said it will abide by the order during the appeal while moving forward with its plan to cap data transfers at 250 GB per month."
Related Stories
[+]
Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October 939 comments
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Watch them win and maintain the 250gb cap.
Comcast subscribers = butt pwnt.
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
If consumers dislike a particular ISPs plan, they can voice their opinions and vote with their wallets. Yes, I understand this comment is probably going to generate dozens of "but I can't get another ISP!" replies, and I preemptively dispute the validity of most of them. I'm living on a Naval installation, and I could drop my current cable provider for a number of DSL providers. Would I have the the same download speeds? Probably not, but the option is still there.
We make tradeoffs when buying services from various vendors. With respect to ISPs, some offer higher speeds but have crappy terms of service. Other providers offer "business" level accounts that don't have any caps aside from throughput, and offer static IPs and unblocked ports. You get what you pay for, and the market as a whole decides what's worth offering.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know how bad internet connectivity is on/around Naval institutions.
Leaving that aside, your dismissal of others' claims because they don't happen to apply to you and thus everyone is the height of egocentric thinking.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Informative)
The cyberonic website asks for a phone number to determine availability, and instead of simply saying yes or no, they put up another form with address, phone number, and EMAIL address demands. Then, even with all the entries filled in, they respond with "all required entries must be filled in, please 'back' and try again."
Phishing for email addresses and phone numbers. Bah. A pox on them and their ilk.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
In my area I have a number of DSL ISPs..but they ALL go through the same TELCO, so there really isn't much of a market there is they all do what the telco tells them. If the telco puts a cap, that all do.
Fortunately I also have FIOS as an option. An option I readily use.
I have lived in communities with only one option.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, many people cannot afford to purchase business class internet service without sacrificing some other portion of their way of life which is more important to them.
These are both very effective barriers to competition in the ISP market. In conclusion, neither the availability of different ISP options in different localities nor the availability of a higher level of service at a higher price are sufficient to ensure competitiveness or the proper functioning of the free market.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Funny)
OMG. I just realized.
The real-estate market is just the most insidious Internet vendor lock-in ever devised.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Our township has a municipality which provides electric, sewer, cable, and (you guessed it!) Internet.
In order to "vote" against this municipality, you also need to go "off grid" because they jack up utilities to help monopolize the local Internet service.
Additionally, we're still 1954-style copper and so the only fiber loops are from: the municipality. Hauling a DS3 from the next-nearest site would be tens of thousands of dollars for the install (Verizon tenatively quoted us 56K$USD).
There was a big project called "Network Maryland" where the whole state was supposed to get fiber construction- but they stopped just a mere 25 miles away. We paid taxes, so that the rest of Maryland could get high-speed internet, and the freedom of choice, and we just got screwed out of it.
No other ISP can compete with them here- so we don't have any others.
Here: You have to vote with your vote, and that means going door-to-door, and convincing locals to vote for something that frankly, they just don't care very much about.
Please stop telling people how content you are. You're contributing to the controversy which helps companies like Comcast, and makes things much harder for people actually trying to "vote".
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Would you like to have the electricity cut off at your house when you go over some amount in a month?
Right now, that limit may very well be enough for you, but what will happen in a year or so?
Returning to the electricity analogy, the power company sets the limit to a value they determine in let's say September, at a house where two old people live.
Everything's fine but summer comes and you turn air conditioning on, or maybe you have a kid and the kid starts watching tv 6 hours a day. Or maybe you start working from home instead of working at the office.
Once you accept limits and restrictions, the only way it's towards more restrictions and limitations.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I really hate it when people start off with their typical captialistic ideology when it doesn't apply. In the case of communications, capitalism has never existed. It has always been about a company buying rights to install infrastructure from a local government with which they could exclusively have access to customers without competition. In some cases, deals have been [quietly] made that prevents competing technologies from existing simultaneously which explains why DSL will exist where Cable internet doesn't (while, oddly enough, cable TV exists so you would think that was a no-brainer..?) and vice versa, and of course FiOS doesn't yet reach.
With the paid-for lack of competition and regulation, they have seen fit to raise prices in areas without competition and lower them where there is competition. They dink with the quality of service instead of reinvesting their [enormous -- read their SEC filings] profits to keep up with the trends and future of the world-wide internet. They lie to customers, which is actually in violation of various consumer laws in fact and in spirit, by using words like "Unlimited" to describe their service and then charge people extra for actually believing them.
What we have here is anything BUT capitalism. Capitalism can't exist where monopolies are permitted to exist.
Parent
Re:D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wow. That's ironic. An anti-capitalism whiner complaining about the ISP market.
Just to clarify, the ISP market sucks because local governments sell exclusive franchises and forbid competition. The problem is precisely the lack of competition, free markets and capitalism that you rail against in the linked to journal entry. If anybody is screwing the consumers in this case, it's the government, not the ISPs.
Spinning it as a failure of capitalism is either ignorant or just plain malicious. It's a perfect example of why too much government regulation is a bad thing.
Parent
Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a BAD example of government OVER regulation! In most cases, its a LACK of stronger regulation that is the problem! Many cities would love 2 cable companies and probably give them incentives!
Public resources are owned by government which has a "monopoly" on them. The error I often see is that some think government is a form of corporation; it can not have any monopoly because it represents all citizens (government corruption is off topic; its OUR fault if we become corporatist, etc.)
In my area the loca
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Like this [bizjournals.com] case, where Verizon wanted to provide FiOS, but the city wouldn't let them? What an incentive!!
I don't think you understand the concept of an ISP franchise. In a nutshell, it's when a city says "Company X is giving us $XX million, in exchange for being the sole ISP in the city, provided they sell at least Y mbit/s with at least a certain le
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Holy crap, I missed the perfect example of how ludicrous the situation is.
Bell's main analog telephony switching station in town here is on prime real estate. It wasn't prime real estate back in ~1950 when it was built, but now it is, and they absolutely cannot relocate for obvious reasons. So they are paying top property taxes and drawing huge electricity to provide the crudest phone service.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine runs one of dozens of VOIP providers in town that nets over $8k a month, and the serve
FCC: Stop the forgery by Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
Slowing or delaying p2p is one thing, but actively forging packets [eff.org], for any reason, should be punished severely.
Forging reset packets does not equal "throttling", even if it does reduce the load on the network.
Please mod parent up! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what I thought of first, too.
Comcast has the FCC wrapped around the idea that it's -slowing- P2P traffic, that it's packet-shaping or throttling P2P. I would be totally fine if they just did that, it's their network, and it -should- be prioritizing VoIP, ICMP, interactive services, browsing, and file transfers (in that order) over P2P. What they are doing is -NOT- throttling, QoS, packetshaping, or whatever you want to call it, they are actively mangling the IP protocol to -drop- connections, making P2P actually unusable.
I'm a Cox customer, and they have a Sandvine appliance that does the same thing. I -cannot use bittorrent-. It's not that bittorrent is slow, or that they put it at a lower priority than my neighbor's porno, they -actually prevent it from working at all-.
The documents and PR I've seen from Comcast all seem to indicate that they are 'managing' the traffic, not 'mangling' it and the FCC has responded as if they were QoS'ing P2P.
Either the FCC doesn't understand what's really happening 'on the ground' here, or Comcast itself has a disconnect between Management and Network Management.*
*I worked somewhere once where there was a seriously overzealous network guy who would throttle services and block things at random. He always said he wasn't when I went to the boss and complained, but when I actually got access to the Packetshaper configs, I could see that he was in fact blocking and throttling services, except on his own machines and the boss'. I've been paranoid ever since.
Parent
Re:FCC: Stop the forgery by Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you are in favor of ISPs forging traffic to prevent people from using bandwidth they paid for?
p2p, like Bittorrent are frequently used to transfer large files legally.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
it's not "your bandwidth", it's theirs too. they want to use p2p.
want "your bandwidth"? start an ISP.
Parsing was hard (Score:2, Informative)
Comcast has filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling that says the company can't delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles.
I read:
Comcast filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling. The appeal says that the company can't delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles.
I then thought:
WTF?! They are trying to bolster net neutrality? Did I just see a pig fly by?
Hmm hhmm this is the phone company calling (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm hmm It seems you have exceeded your 25 telephone calls per month, sir.
How can we do that?
Snort snort. tee hee.
How can we do that?
We're the TELEPHONE COMPANY, sir.
chortle chortle snort snort.
They may have a point (Score:2)
I could be wrong here.
Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:3, Insightful)
Switch from Comcast's cable to Dish Network / DirecTV, or a competing Cable company's product.
Switch from Comcast's internet to DSL, FIOS or even Satellite or Cellular internet provider.
Vote with your wallet....
Once enough subscribers cancel Comcast, maybe they'll finally pull their collective heads out of their collective asses...
Until then, they will continue to do whatever they want to try and maximize profit and to hell with their customers...
Re:Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Bad assumptions... (Score:2)
If you want to fund the difference between my cable Internet bill and a channelized DS-3 (I only need ~6 DS-1s to equal cable), I'll be glad to follow your advice.
Re:Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as Dad can browse CNN.com (or other, shall we say, less savory sites), Mom can check her email, and little Joey can play his flash games, there will be no mass uprising.
Again, I'm not trying the minimize the fact that voting with your wallet is a good answer, just reminding everyone that the number of wallets involved is statistically small.
Parent
Re:Sounds like Comcast's death-knell... (Score:4, Informative)
That's the answer a lot companies would like to sell the government on, that there is a "free" market for people to choose the provider they wish.
Yet out of the other side of their mouth, they go back to the government and ask for monopolies in the areas they service so they can recoup their cost of building out infrastructure. Hell, they've even resorted to suing municipalities to prevent them from building out their own.
Truth is, for many people in the US, there is no competitive market. There is one provider in their area, and that's it.
Much as Comcast may boohoo about the FCC and whatnot, here's the schtick: You want to be a monopoly, you get regulated. End of story. Don't want that? Then don't ask for government handouts in the form of monopolies or suing competition.
Parent
look for a new isp (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article: "Comcast announced it would put a 250-gigabyte-per-month bandwidth cap on residential customers. Customers may get a warning if they go over the monthly cap, and after their first warning, Comcast will suspend their service for a year if they go over the cap a second time."
Lose you internet connect for a year! I do not have HD TV but how big are those HD movies that people are downloading? How many people have more then one computer on the internet in their home? Take a family of 4 (mom,dad, two teenagers) There are at least 3 computers in the house (4 most likely). If a movie is download by each computer, 250GB will be eaten up really fast. I know people with netflix who download 5-6 HD movies a week on one computer. I think they will run out of HD movies soon, but 250GB will be eaten up fast if one is downloading HD movies.
I didn't even go to the P2P stuff. This is a move to slow down P2P. Comcast should just come out and say it (if they haven't already). Maybe Comcast should work on improving the bandwidth of it's network instead of spending the time and money on restrictions. I really feel for those who have no other choice.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You should note also, that those plans are for 50gb to about 100gb. We don't have 250gb caps here...
Re:look for a new isp (Score:4, Insightful)
Well if it's worse there, then clearly we shouldn't complain that it's getting bad here~
Parent
Re:look for a new isp (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, boo hoo, here come the comments from Australians saying "I only get 1KBps download speed with a 2MB cap for $100 a month!"
We know your internet sucks. We feel for you, we really do.
Just because yours is worse doesn't mean we can't fight to make ours better.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because AU has it bad does that mean that everyone else should too? Should the Japanese scale down their inet infrastructure to match yours?
Yes, as has been said your inet needs work there. Don't blame us thou for wanting to make sure ours is getting better, not worse.
Re:look for a new isp (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a move to slow down P2P.
I disagree. The more likely option is that this is a move to discourage the use of Internet-based movie services. Such services directly affect Comcast's advertising and on-demand revenue in a negative manner.
Parent
absofuckinglutely right (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone that has read my comments for awhile will know that I tried to point this out months ago, and got flamed for it basically.
The problem with letting Comcast or any ISP that also provides content do anything to shape or filter traffic is that there is no oversight on how they will do this to their advantage. In this case, anything that limits your video usage/sharing in favor of using their video delivery systems is an unfair advantage. This is exactly why bundling 3 or more services together is a bad idea for the consumer... very bad idea.
If Comcast is allowed to mess with traffic on their ISP services, they WILL do so in a way that favors their other services and content. I don't believe there are any scientific studies on the probability of this happening, but you won't find many people (or rocks, walls, monkeys etc) that will tell you that it's unlikely that a big corporation will act unethically if given the chance to do so when nobody is watching.
As in the case of P2P forged packets, they will do whatever they can get away with. Comcast is, and has shown themselves to be an unethical company. period. They should not be trusted. Class actions suits should follow shortly.
Parent
Delay = suck (Score:2, Interesting)
The delaying is BS. Even as a large downloader the 250gig limit doesn't bother me that much. Before it was the lack of transparency that bothered me so much. Saying unlimited and then cutting people off for some unknown arbitrary amount? No. Now I can at least choose to stay with a KNOWN limit or go somewhere else. I really hope they lose this appeal.
It's my way on my superhighway... (Score:3, Funny)
You can't drive that big-ass truck on my superhighway...
Only big-ass trucks carrying my brand of goods
can travel on my superhighway.
This ticket issued by: Comcast Traffic Police
volume caps: yes, traffic preferences: no (Score:3, Insightful)
I think having volume caps and network neutrality is a good compromise. Once there are volume caps, however, there shouldn't be an preferential treatment to one kind of traffic or another. ISPs simply aren't in a position to decide which network traffic is important and which network traffic is not. For example, I'd like my VNC-over-SSH to be treated as just as important and real-time as someone's VoIP traffic.
All Comcast needs to do is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... delay the traffic of the highest bandwidth (ab)users. By doing this without regard to the content of the traffic, or its TCP port numbers, etc., then they are in a neutral position. How to do this delaying is another matter. They need to avoid focusing on peer-to-peer file sharing just because it happens to be the activity of the biggest users. As long as that is true, focusing on the actual bandwidth hogging will effectively slow down whatever usage is involved.
How to slow down users needs to do something other than forged RST packets. Aside from the legal issues, protocol developers will figure out ways to become RST immune. One simple way is to carry on as of there was no RST and see if a normal packet comes along within a certain time frame (a couple seconds). If not, then the RST is considered real. If there is a normal packet soon enough, then the RST is forged. Comcast is using this technique because it is NOT practical for them to selective drop individual packets in transit; RST forgery is a lower cost injection method. But if they continue this method, geeks will figure out ways around it (plural ... there's more than one way to do this).
Ultimately they will have to make it dynamically adjust the bandwidth rate on the customer attachment equipment. If a customer bursts traffic at high rates too much, gradually lower their bandwidth burst rate limit until it reaches the level where continuous traffic solidly for a month equals 250GB.
Give them the finger and walk away. (Score:5, Insightful)
The download cap is a poorly disguised attempt to head-off video downloads via the internet.
And I'm referring to the legal ones - like iTunes+Apple TV and Netflix's Roku player.
You can get video and voice from many other companies. These services require bandwidth. Buy these services from companies other than your cable company, and you will find yourself potentially hitting the cap. Buy these services from the cable company (delivered digitally) and the caps disappear.
This is a classic case of monopoly abuse.
-ted
Better yet ask a court to throttle your payments.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or better yet file a case in court asking it to throttle your payments to comcast: If comcast throttles your connection speed to a lower level for 20 mins, you can throttle your payment to a lower rate calculated exclusively by you for 20 mins. (say 8Mbps DSL costs $100 a month unlimited; that works out to 2 cents a minute. If the speed drops down to 15Kbps for 20 mins each day for 30 days it amounts to 8/100*0.0015*(600).
State to small-claims court that comcast is violating a contract by "damaging" goods: so you want to pay only for correctly arrived goods. Comcast's high-powered lawyers can't do shit here.
Get a court order allowing you not to pay for damaged goods: then apply your own definition of damaged goods and send off a payment you calculate along with the court order: If comcast refuses to accept the same, they are in violation of a court order: in which case you can "demand" they fulfill their contract. If they accept, then you have set a precedent.
Either way you win.
Use ingenuity instead of anger: corporates do the same. Logical, emotionless, greedy: be like them. Play them at their own game with a home advantage=Small claims court.
Parent
To: MODS -- Comcast is NOT a common carrier! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mods, please wise up: Comcast is not a common carrier
(I'll probably be downmodded to hell for pointing out the truth here, but what the heck!)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They can't be nailed because of provisions in the DMCA (or other laws, I am not sure which). Those provisions don't require them to act like a common carrier.
Re:To: MODS -- Comcast is NOT a common carrier! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:To: MODS -- Comcast is NOT a common carrier! (Score:5, Interesting)
Safe Harbor, not common carrier, is what protects Comcast as per the DMCA and the CDA.
Common carrier is a completely different concept that affects telcos, not cable companies.
Modifying TCP streams--however repugnant--does not automatically mean the ISP is liable for the content that traverses its network. That's the law, like it or not.
they have begun monitoring and demonstrating preference for and against certain content crossing their lines. That, under the DMCA, removes all safe harbor protections.
Where is the MAFIAA when you actually WANT them to sue someone?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the DMCA "safe harbor" provisions. It gives these assholes all the privileges of being a common carrier, without any of the responsibilities. It's yet another reason why the DMCA is a fucked up law and should be repealed.
Re:commiecast doesn't get the law (Score:5, Insightful)
... inserting forged protocol packets ...
I consider content the TCP stream that delivers my (X)HTML, CSS, binary data, etc. How, exactly, is inserting additional data into the stream not modifying the content?
Parent
Re:commiecast doesn't get the law (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that has me curious is why they haven't been taken to court over this.
It seems to me that forging packets is both a form of communication interception, and impersonation. Which should be landing them in hot water with a number of state and federal laws.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What? That's less than an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude. Well within slashdot's desired accuracy.