Congressman Tells Comcast, Hands Off BitTorrent 304
An anonymous reader writes "Just a few months back, the Net Neutrality debate was all but dead. Luckily for fans of a free Internet, the telcos are their own worst enemies. Recent stories involving Verizon Wireless blocking pro-choice groups, AT&T censoring Pearl Jam's anti-war comments from a streaming concert, and most recently, Comcast finally admitting to using anti-BitTorrent filters. The Net Neutrality debate would appear to be alive and kicking, with Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) being the first politician to make a public statement sharply criticizing Comcast's actions."
Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagues (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast has politely reminded this wayward congressman that in America laws are paid for by bribes. Comcast then offered the congressman a "campaign contribution", silencing his dissent. The system works.
Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu (Score:5, Informative)
That is why F.C.C. rules should be changed to ban paid-for political ads on radio, tv, satellite and cable.
They should bring back the old rules where broadcasters commit on their license/renewal applications to a minimum amount of public affairs programming (which could included free political time) and limits on the maximum number of commercial minutesper hour. Broadcasters could pick their own numbers, but could be at a disadvantage at renewal time if a competing applicant wants to do more to serve the community.
What I suggest is not a restriction on free speech, only a restriction on what broadcasters can accept payment for.
Most of the corruption we see with our politicians relates to them selling out to obtain money for campaigns. Eliminating money from the picture for radio and tv would certainly lessen the need to raise money for campaigns.
We should go back to earlier much more restrictive rules on how many stations a licensee could own. I think we should go beyond that and require that some specified percentage (perhaps increasing over time) of stations in a region have licensees that live in the city-grade coverage area of their station. Having local licensees would go a long ways towards making broadcasters more responsive to serving the needs of their local communities.
Having a free and diverse press and broadcasters and a free flow of information is essential for democracy to function properly. We should not allow any corporate or special interest groups to own a sizeable chunk of our broadcast stations. These stations are supposed to be trustees of the public interest, not just cash cows for large companies.
Mexico is going that route right now (Score:5, Interesting)
Mexico has approved a reform to the current electoral legislation which does something similar.
The last presidential elections were so full of spots on TV that were more about bad mouthing the competitor than proposing solutions. A lot of money had to be raised and compromises were made by the competitors for sure.
The winner is the one who has the deepest wallet.
From now on, candidates can use only the government's paid time on TV.
The media is going crazy of course because they won't get a lot of money any more for the spots, and they're masquerading this worry as a "free speech" violation (because they won't be able editorialize the campaign coverage in any form)
It's not a coincidence that Dong Nguyen Huu has said that the Mexican electoral system is one of the most advanced in the world. Let's see how it goes.
Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. We demand that our presidents' faces be "presidential," discriminating against those with "non-presidential" faces. Facial discrimination is the great unspoken tragedy that stalks this nation. Fight facism now!
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sadly, we live in a facist state.
And this is related to corporate purchasing of congressmen how, exactly?
Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu (Score:4, Interesting)
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Loving your country is one thing. Believing it can do no wrong is nationalism.
national governments (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I don't understand the usage of this...or the danger of it. I mean, doesn't everyone want their country/nation to come out on top? Isn't that what a nation's government works for (supposedly)?
No, a national or federal government's job is to defend the nation and protect its citizens, but not as a nanny. "You can't do this, you can't eat that."
FalconRe: (Score:3, Informative)
oligarchy: a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also : a group exercising such control
from: http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=oligarchy [merriam-webster.com]
Good try! (Score:3, Interesting)
If we actually understood the definitions of things, we couldn't call Bush Adolf Hitler. We couldn't call Al Gore Jerry Garcia, and you couldn't call Hillary a well trained irish setter. Really, where would the fun be in that?
Oh yeah, reasoned debate about the issues at hand... only losers do that.
Until then, I'm just going to be sad that a congressm
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The 14 points of Fascism (Score:5, Interesting)
Fascist Warning Sign #1: Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
If you're not with "U.S." you're a terrorist. Bills named the "Patriot Act" so sheeple feel warm and fuzzy.
Fascist Warning Sign #2: Disdain for the importance of human rights.
Suspension of Habeus corpus, illegal phone taps, "enemy combatants", black bag kidnappings, Patriot Act...
Fascist Warning Sign #3: Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
"Axis of Evil"
Fascist Warning Sign #4: The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
Bush has had the military deployed in combat for 6 years. His administration continues to suggest they will attack other countries if they don't follow our ultimatums.
Fascist Warning Sign #5: Rampant sexism.
This one maybe not so much. Our international talking head (Condoleeza) counts against #5 I would say.
Fascist Warning Sign #6: A controlled mass media.
Maybe not directly, but the networks kowtow in order to not be left out and really don't question much.
Fascist Warning Sign #7: Obsession with national security.
This one should be pretty obvious.
Fascist Warning Sign #8: Religion and ruling elite tied together.
In God We Trust.
Fascist Warning Sign #9: Power of corporations protected.
This one isn't just a Bush thing. This goes back decades.
Fascist Warning Sign #10: Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
See #9
Fascist Warning Sign #11: Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
Suppression of global warming research, laws/court rulings protecting IP while minimizing fair use.
Fascist Warning Sign #12: Obsession with crime and punishment.
Bush governed Texas, the state with a record for most executions. Before his time began the war on drugs. Even individual states are guilty of this.
Fascist Warning Sign #13: Rampant cronyism and corruption.
Abrahmoff, Halliburton no-bid contracts, etc etc
Fascist Warning Sign #14: Fraudulent elections.
Who can tell. Maybe not directly, but supporters running local campaigns have passed out false information pamphlets in attempts to keep.
So that's what, 2 of 14 I can't come up with something right off the top of my head. Viva Liberty!
habeas corpus (Score:3, Informative)
There are currently limitations on habeas corpus for aliens, not citizens.
The GP is right and you're wrong on this. All the Bush admin feels it needs to do is call someone an enemy combatant [consortiumnews.com]. This admin denied the US citizen Jose Padilla habeas corpus. CATO has called this a Dangerous Precedent [cato.org].
Falcon
Great start (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great start (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great start (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great start (Score:5, Informative)
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Best of luck with that!
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Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Interesting)
1286 K uploaded at a rate of 20KB/s. This is the first time in weeks I have seen upload speeds better than 0.0 KB/s and a transfered size larger than 0.1 KB. Since I am finally able to help spread Ubuntu, I'll let it run all day. Maybe I'll be able to upload more than I download for a change. Seeing any upload traffic after a completed download is highly unusual on Comcast lately.
Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Funny)
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Cut and paste...
4336.0 of 4336.0 MB at 63.49 KB/s
16 hours, 59 minutes, and 51 seconds
Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:4, Funny)
4336.0 of 4336.0 MB at 63.49 KB/s
16 hours, 59 minutes, and 51 seconds
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Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
NN is preferential shaping based on the source of the data. QOS is preferential shaping based on the type of data.
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it is not about throttling, it is about killing entirely. When every attempt to connect is killed, you are not delaying traffic, you are stopping it entirely. But that is only one issue on the table with Comcast and its anti-BitTorrent activities, and quite frankly, it is a minor issue compared to the other.
More important to me, and hopefully to everybody else, is that Comcast is killing BitTorrent traffic by spoofing the users, and not always its own users. They are pretending to be their customers and the people they connect with, whether or not the people they are connected with are Comcast customers, to send the reset packets.
I don't know about you, but quite frankly, having
With a massive company such as Comcast faking its identity, it is out-and-out mortifying.
Throttling would be one thing. Killing by falsifying oneself as the customers they represent is another entirely.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Completely blocking an entire protocol isn't QoS, Qos is about giving priority to certain types of traffic that need lower latency or more bandwidth, an example would be VoIP which needs low latency to not become useless.
What Comcast has been doing is outright blocking an entire protocol, sort of like how some ISPs block their users' ability to use SMTP, mostly outbound but in some cases inbound as well. The difference being that there is a good reason to block outbound SMTP, it may be a PITA for those trying to run their own mail server but at least the reason isn't so much direct greed as it is to protect the network at large from zombie machines trying to spam the rest of the net...
/Mikael
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Both have legitimate and devious uses.
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Filtering (or throttling into uselessness) a protocol to lower the overall bandwidth consumption is only done because the ISP in question oversold their pipes too much and is not investing enough money into upgrading and maintaining their networks.
It is done to cover up greed and is an anti-service to their customers and the internet at large.
Leaving t
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
They're actively resetting ANY TCP connection that involves uploading significant amounts of data for more than a few seconds.
There have been numerous reports of this killing Lotus Domino connections too, and I wouldn't be surprised if I found lots of complaints on the SmugMug forums about people being unable to upload pictures if they were on Comcast. (Same traffic patterns - lots of upload for a while.)
Still, anything that involves resetting/blocking connections is not QoS. I don't think people would care if BT were the "bottom of the barrel" and was superseded by any other traffic type - it would still be wicked fast at 3 AM. The problem here is that Comcast is actively killing connections regardless of what the actual status of the rest of the network is, instead of taking advantage of TCP's built in congestion control mechanisms to slow things down.
I worry that if done wrong, legislation will be passed that even forbids QoS, which will make things really bad for both users and ISPs. The legislation would have to have wording that QoS is OK as long as the "bottom of the barrel" protocols are able to use full bandwidth when no one else is using the network.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
The ironic thing is that this is more likely to hurt people who download files by FTP or HTTP than BitTorrent. It should not be hard at all to tune BitTorrent use a larger number of shorter-lived connections. Of course, doing so would basically bring down Comcast's network pretty hard, as it would increase the overhead of BitTorrent traffic fairly dramatically.... I wonder if they've thought about what they are likely to create by doing this....
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, the easiest workaround would be to use a custom transport mechanism layered over UDP which includes authentication for connection management (i.e. there's no way to spoof the equivalent of a TCP RST.) The problem is that a LOT of research has gone into TCP congestion control algorithms in the past two decades, and the initial implementation of any custom congestion control scheme will likely be FAR less "fair" than TCP is.
Unfortunately, most current secure transport schemes were only designed to protect data from eavesdropping, not to protect against denial of service attacks against the connection. For example, SSL and TLS both need to be layered above a reliable transport layer (usually TCP), and it is TCP itself that Comcast is attacking.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but your bits aren't as large as the next guy's so you'll have to compensate with a cool car.
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Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
my personal idea of NN is "don't shape by origin/destination ever, shape by traffic only when absolutely necessary".
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End result they won't know if their network can handle 15% of user demand or 5% and eventually they won't care!
Their IT guys go home thinking that the network is only using 40% of bandwidth because they killed everything that might use more bandwidth, also they're attacking upload... which doesn't make any sense since they buy syncronous links to the net.
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That seems like a fair policy. But the broadband operators aren't likely to give up on billing the endpoints. To quote Willie Sutton [wikipedia.org] "That's where the money is."
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That's a nice soundbite but it's an oversimplfication.
If I'm using up the majority of the bandwidth on my block downloading files, and Comcast decides to throttle me, they're doing QoS, even if they're just totally throttling my speed without regard to the type of data.
They also are doing QoS if they throttle my uploads, although it's preferentiial shaping based on the source of the data, namely
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Not unless they're equally blocking ALL other P2P protocols, including those used by major companies...
What if they were blocking SIP (Vonage, et al.), but giving a high priority to their own company's proprietary, non-SIP, VoIP protocol? Gee, if you'd just license the technology from them, you too can get high-priority on your traffic...
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Just because QoS can make it easier for some network administrators, doesn't mean that it doesn't have anything to do with neutrality. Calling only one of those two net neutrality is just as stupid and idiot
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Not Qos (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want to be able to have a conversation at all, we need to stop confusing QOS with fraud. QOS sets attributes in packets which are designed to establish priority. Fraud (in this case) means posing as the customer and sending a fake message, then lying about sending the fake message.
For example, if a telco decided to cut sampling rates on telephone calls from 8khz to 7.6khz for residential service to customers of other carriers, that would be quality of service (QOS). If, on the other hand, the carrier were to use their equipment to dial everyone who called you who was not a customer of the same carrier, spoofing your phone number on caller ID, and using a voice filter which made their voice sound enough like yours to be convincing, and telling them "Don't call me anymore. Stop. I don't want to hear from you for at least a week. Got it? Yeah, I mean it. Stop calling for a while. Don't take that tone with me. Just stop calling. Yes, this is me. Who else would I be? Now Stop Calling." And then told you that they would NEVER do such a thing. That would be fraud.
Since telcos are being trusted with our identities (phone numbers, IPs, etc), our privacy (which they'd never violate without a warrant, as we've seen), and the functioning, as generally intended and advertised, of the Internet, character means something in this context.
I hope this helps us get our terms in agreement, so that we can have an argument, or even a conversation, on NN.
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by default, ISP is not allowed to block anything (QoS only when necessary (peak hours), but nothing else), but if the customer says they want spam/viruses/bittorrent blocked, the ISP jumps in and enables that for them on a per-customer basis. if they find they want bittorrent unblocked for at a later date, off goes the block.
Too late for Comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
What *did* annoy me, after the decision was taken, was that my difficulties with ichat [apple.com] over the last few months seem to be similarly down to Comcast policies.
I use iChat a lot to keep in touch with my family (all of whom have Macs, and 4-way video-conferencing can be pretty cool). There's several thousand miles between us, so this is one of the few ways we can actually see each other without major travel.
Until a few months ago, it all worked great. Now, I get less than a minute of great picture, and then everything breaks up. I was putting it down to transatlantic bandwidth issues, but then I tried it from work, and (lo and behold) had no problems whatsoever.
I pay (not for long, now though, the T1 arrives in 2 weeks) for the most bandwidth Comcast offer, and I cannot believe I average even 1% of that bandwidth. To have them limit me when I *do* want to use it, as a deliberate *general* policy of theirs, is infuriating. All I can do is cancel the service, and hope others do too. Eventually, hopefully, they'll get the message. Not everyone can cancel due to the monopoly they hold in some areas, but perhaps enough can to make a difference.
Now a T1 used to be a lot of bandwidth, but it's not so much any more (1.5Mbit/sec is pretty poor by advertised-bandwidth standards). I'm willing to trade off the small time-periods I actually can use that advertised bandwidth for the reliability of always having the smaller amount - it may not work for everyone, but it works for me
And so, Comcast lose another ~$200/month. Hopefully part of a trend, because won't anyone think of the network ? [grin]
Simon.
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Re:Too late for Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
What really annoys me is that my tax dollars are used to provide these "utilities" with a limited sanctioned monopoly for the supposed public good, yet they don't offer services that address the whole public. If you really only intend your $65/mo service to be for grandmothers who use the account for email and checking up on their local church and the occasional amazon service, then offer a more expensive account for people who want heavy use and connect to work via VPN, back stuff up to remote servers, connect to colo hosted systems, use bit-torrent, watch lots of streaming videos, etc.
And for people who want to know "how in the hell do you use so much bandwidth?! 30gb should be more than enough!". Well, just downloading a few popular podcasts will do it. Especially now that they're HD quality. Diggnation, Crankygeeks, DL.TV, Totally Rad Show and a couple others downloaded every week at an average of almost 500mb each comes out to about 12gb per month right there. And that's if you aren't acquiring them via bit torrent where you'd have some overhead as well as at least 6gb to 12gb in upward bandwidth. So right there, you're at 24gb. Just to keep up with half a dozen weekly podcasts.
Throw in a couple people at your address listening to a lot of streaming radio. Watching streaming movies and news. Downloading five to ten gigs of demos on Xbox Live and Play Station Network. Perhaps connecting to your office with VPN and VNC to use your desktop. That's quite a lot of bandwidth. For completely legitimate purposes. And we haven't even touched things like using remote backup services that you can find online or downloading linux ISOs or the other streaming services like Vongo, Netflix and Amazon Unboxed.
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That's the most likely thing to do, and a very appropriate consumer-level response. If all consumers would take that simple step, then we would even need alternative measures. But since most people are willing to shut up and deal with crappy service and marketing lies, we do have other possible reprisals. For you, you might consider a lawsuit, especially one in small claims court, where (if I understand correctly) you would argue with a regular huma
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I think it is [quote.com]
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I need more upstream than Comcast will supply so I can run a server and VPN. Plus the bittorrent performance has been horrible lately
T1? (Score:2)
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Isn't it strange... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think you need to put your political affiliations aside if you simply want to point the finger at this administration as far as their track record on rights.
Sure, it's worse now than it has been in the memorable past but it seems that with each new administration, regardless if they be the jackass or the elephant, sells their candidates on bringing new change abou
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In many ways when it comes to the Comcast issue, people seem to be falling primarily into 2 main camps. Both are saying what they are doing is wrong, But some are saying "We need Gov'ment for force them to be net neutral." Others are saying "If you don't like it, Let your money do the walking, and go with another ISP."
The funny thing is, that MOST people tend to agree
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... that we actually cheer when a politician we put into office for once stands up and protects our [fill in civic right of your choice]? I mean, when did things go so bad? (rhetorical question) It's sad that we all have gotten used to a status quo where our elected leaders work hand in hand with big business and constantly screw us over.
Yeah, it really is sad that every new change has to be met with "Ok, so how are you fucking me now?" It really is a surprise when the answer is "No screwing, this is actually a good thing."
KISS (Score:3, Interesting)
1. All common carriers must allow other providers to connect to them on a naked pipe
2. All providers must support standard protocols.*
3. Providers may only prioritize data/bandwidth based on protocol, not orgin/destination.
5. No data/bandwidth throttling, only prioritization.
*I'd leave defining "standard" up to ICAAN, with these additional rules:
1. The protocol must be open - anyone can see how it works and get specs for it.
2. Usage or modification of the protocol must not be restricted by patents or copyright.
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You do realize that would be a lot of government intervention, right? In fact, the reason why our state of affairs wrt broadband is because the government hasn't meddled enough. With the new ruling that DSL is an information service, you can say goodbye to Speakeasy, Covad, and all the other CLECs. It'll be DSL through your phone monopoly or cable Internet service through your cable monopoly. So long as the owners of the infrastructure sell services on that infrastructure, there will be no real c
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It is government intervention, but it's a lot less than the massive document that is currently Net Neutrality.
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You do realize that ISPs are not common carriers, right?
> 2. All providers must support standard protocols.*
Great, I guess the IETF can disband, since it's now the US congress that really vets standards.
> 3. Providers may only prioritize data/bandwidth based on protocol, not orgin/destination.
So the head end video distributor node can't pre-empt your xbox's background downloads? I'm afraid the reality is more com
Thankfully.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple soulation (Score:5, Interesting)
If Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or anyone else blocks any content for any reason, they are (from that point on) legally liable for all remaining content. This is because the have made an effort to control the content crossing there service and by default must agree that all remaining content is acceptable.
Then remind there legal department that it means "If you keep it up, we will hold you responsible for all the remaining content including but not limited to all the child porn, child predators, etc."
In other words, they have violated the common carrier clause and thus are not protected from prosecution!
Where is a lawyer when you need one?
Re:Simple soulation (Score:5, Insightful)
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What, some chat is not used for that so you don't want to block all of it? Interesting...
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ISPs aren't common carriers in the first place. There a pretty big hole in your plan.
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Congrats to the Congressman (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God. There is an alarming trend among those who want to see a "neutral net" (a sentiment I agree with) to have "Dr. Government" fix it all. this is a slippery slope in plain sight; the idea of trusting the government to keep the net neutral doesn't appeal to me any more than having Comcast do it. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interest is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the government's control of the network?
Fortunately, we have this convenient mechanism called the free market, where an outcry of foul play means an increased demand for competition. I realize this doesn't mean overnight those in Comcast-only zones are given an alternative, but over time, it is possible.
Now, when it comes to the infrastructure, the actual physical cables, etc., there's some room for talk as to whether the Government can have some limited intervention there, because we're dealing with interstate business and infrasturcture... but that's another story.
Re:Congrats to the Congressman (Score:5, Insightful)
This "hands off" talk assumes there is a free market already. There isn't, and the market will continue to devolve into an oligopoly until the government does something about it.
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Actually, a good function of government is ensuring that those who have power (near-monopoly cable companies) do not abuse it. If the big providers started doing this and persisted as a group, they could make it the standard. That is when the government of the people needs to step in and fix the issue. Just another reason why government has to be
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Truth in advertising (Score:2)
Just what part of "unlimited access" in the contract do these ISPs NOT understand?
Shrug (Score:2)
Charging more for users who use more bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Quaking in their boots (Score:2)
Tiers of Service.. bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now a Tier based service may "cost more for unlimited" but it might actually BE unlimited.
Simple Question: Would you pay $20 more a month for truely unlimited service of which you could even run se
If Nerds Can't Get It Right (Score:2)
Every time net neutrality comes up at Slashdot, a large part of the conversation is about what is NN and what falls under other concepts (like QoS). I can't help but wonder, if a community of nerds can't stay clear on the basic concepts needed to discuss this issue then how are governments expected to? If there are nerds who don't get it, then what chance do Alaskan senators have?
What is being missed in all this (Score:2, Informative)
RIAA revenue (Score:3, Funny)
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This is Slashdot.
Seems nice enough to me.
Re:Nice glasses (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice glasses (Score:5, Informative)
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1. He was managing an unpopular war.
2. He'd claimed to have some secret plans that he couldn't reveal to fix the US's problems. There was a real spike in claims that the public would just have to trust its Executive branch,
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Hold the phone (Score:2)
Huh, all this time I thought that you needed to be in the pocket of big business to get into office and stay.
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Inept? That would be biting the hand that feeds!
You show me the elected politician who got to office on a state of federal level who didn't spend more on their campaign than they have been paid. You may find a couple but I doubt even that. As long as the American public keeps voting for the guy or gal with the most commercials on the TV this will not change. Grass roo
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Funny you should say that seeing as how it was *their* internet in the first place.