Yeah, right. The ISPs have gotten so far into bed with the RIAA that the only thing listed in the "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the right to remain silent.

Comcast is beginning to feel the pressure, they are stalling for time now with faux "rights bills". Now is the time to push EVEN HARDER for full Net Neutrality legislation. We have them on the ropes, don't let up now!

Not surprising that missing from their list of "industry experts" are groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the EFF [arstechnica.com].

And here's the catch:

Which still means that if the P2P "software vendors" (who are these?) pays them, they'll allow it. Great neutrality.

They suggest SELF-regulation...

I wonder how long this regulation will actually last before it goes back to the status quo.

or, how about instead they just provide the service people are, um, you know paying for?

Just move my packets around without f'ing with them, please and thank you.

Anything they propose will not be binding and will not have the force of law. Any policy statements or forms of "self-regulation" are at the whim of those who want to make [more] money and so changes of policy will happen at any time for any reason without notice. Users will remain as the last people to know when something bad is going on.

It is clear that companies like Virgin and Comcast and the rest need the force of law and the occasional lawsuit in order to keep them in line. Otherwise they will stray outside their areas hunting for more money. The force of law isn't enough by itself... they have to be spanked to keep them in line. It's rather like raising children. Constantly exploring and pushing their limits and no matter how often you cite the rules to them, they will break the rules and require punishment. When a child exclaims, "I don't need punishment I'll be good!" I doubt anyone actually believes that child. So why should we believe Comcast?

How did it become a monopoly in the first place? What stops another company from springing up to provide cable internet services for cheaper? Answer - government intervention.

What the hell are you talking about? I live in an area where competing cable companies show up all the time (there used to be several in fact). The problem isn't that the government doesn't allow these companies to exist, it's that comcast buys them all out.

Exactly. The FCC and Congress are looking into the matter specifically because the industry has shown that it's not capable of "self regulation," which is what they supposedly have been doing all along.

Which in turn means that if this is accepted throttling/blocking open source peer to peer is fair game.

Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?

Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?

When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.

Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.

Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.

This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.

Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.

No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.

Comcast chief technology officer Tony Werner said the proposed "bill of rights and responsibilities," to be released later this year, is in the best interest of service providers, peer-to-peer companies and consumers.

How could anything possibly be in the best interest of all of those groups? Consumers want cheap, unlimited, unfiltered connections. ISPs want to oversell their capacity and charge too much for their service while secretly throttling connections.

We shouldn't. Service providers should be seperated from line ownership, and lines should be owned by the state or local municipalities. What really needs to be done is for Comcast to rot in hell though.

All the players who have power: (read the large businesses), get together and have a scrum. Not invited to the table are the (1) the public, or (2) the content creators. - both of which are large and mostly unorganized groups of individuals.

Sounds suspiciously like the process the industry went through to re-invent copyright law.

One only needs to be guaranteed "Rights" in the context of Wrongs. Comcast and Virgin and others should get their head completely out of their ass and start providing a real **customer** focused service (instead of profit-driven) and this whole issue goes away.

Finally?

I think you misunderstand.

Rights are for the ISPs.
Responsibilities are for the users.

I expect that the definition of "Rights" in "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the same as the one in "Digital Rights Management". There will be a whole lot you can't do, and very little that you can do, which you already had before the bill.

P2P Bill of Restrictions?

What stops another company from springing up to provide cable internet services for cheaper? Answer - government intervention.

Whenever I hear this, I always ask: Are you seriously suggesting that there be more than one company in a given area running physical cables to every house? Or are you suggesting more government regulation to force them to share the cables they've got?

Saying that government regulation is somehow going to fix what government regulation broke is absurd.

It sounds funny, yes, but why is that absurd? Insert anything else in place of the words "government regulation" -- like, oh, "my kid" or "the construction company" -- and it doesn't seem absurd anymore.

So when the juries were convicting innocent people that got death penalty sentences based on shoddy evidence it was really the defendant's fault. Oh it all makes sense now. *rolls eyes* Let me guess it's also the other driver's fault when they get killed by a drunk driver? Clearly they should have known not to be driving near this drunk driver, right?

Wow your callous disregard for the lives of others is rather disturbing. I bet you'd be singing a much different tune if it was your or someone you know who was sent to death row wrongly. But hey, as long as it's someone else why give a fuck, right?

The only way I can see "working with" P2P software developers would be:

CC: "Is there anything we could provide you that would allow you to reduce your impact on our network?"
P2P Author: "Multicast please."
CC: "We don't do multicast because no applications support it."
P2P Author: "If you build it, they will come."

Getting up in arms about an extremely small number of individuals is a waste of time.

Welcome to fascism 101: Society as a whole is more important than the "small number of individuals" we sacrifice to use their blood to lube the gears of government to make sure a government employee never has to strain themselves working too hard.

you failed to take a course of action that would lead you out of that. In short, there's something wrong with you.

And in this semester, we explain how anything the government does can never be wrong, and that when cops lie [google.com] to convict you, it's your fault for making the government lie.

Enjoy that boot, it'll be stomping in your face for all eternity.

There's more need for it now than ever before.

Corporations have learned on a global-cultural level that they can buy laws. They saw it happen and now they are all trying to play the same game. The data updates on OpenSecrets.org has never seemed busier.

That business and government relationship needs to be severed in order to make the government's actions swing in favor of "the people" instead of "the people that hold controlling interest in General Motors."

How about this?

1) Comcast's customers shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. pay their bill).
2) Comcast shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. deliver any network traffic without prejudice).

You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.

Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.

Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.

Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature

And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.

Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.

Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.

That's fine and dandy, until they include the clause of "we may change this contract whenever we want without notice" like everyone else does.

I like how the companies who are granted specific monopoly power via government regulations speak out against "government regulation". By definition, if the government regulates the industry in order to protect the players from competition then those players should be subject to full government oversight and regulation, not only regulation when it helps the share holders.

What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.

Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.

But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.

It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.

To illustrate the fundamental difference:

- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.

But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.

- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.

But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.

Etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.

Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.

I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.

I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?

I'd rather trust a goverments incompentence than a company's greed. Thank god I live in a country where they don't charge tolls.

For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative (schools, roads and the like) that also provide for access that is as fair and public as the services you say are inadequate.

For what it's worth, I agree that the US government isn't doing what it needs to. I can't say I agree that that failure means that government can't work, it just means that the US government isn't working.

It would seem, judging by the behavior of modern ISPs, that this is happening anyways. Prices are high, service is mediocre, and now we're getting a game of content provider (and ultimately consumer) extortion.

Market forces aren't working because there's an insufficient amount of competition. Either there needs to be regulation, or there needs to be a breakup of the large ISPs. If government shouldn't do this, then who should? If the market can give no remedy to the consumers, then who does?

Yeah because local, state and/or national governments have done such a wonderful job with their ownership of the Retirement plan (SS almost bankrupt), the roads (rising tolls and decreasing maintenance), the right-of-ways for cable tv lines (bribes to politicians to gain permanent monoopoly), and the government-owned schools (duh; where's the U.S. located on a world map? Who knows? Certainly not a gov't graduation.).

Our public schools were doing just fine until Reagan created the federal Dept of Education. States handled this just fine on their own. Our electrical infrastructure and water infrastructure are also pretty damned decent too and those are heavily regulated utilities. Maybe you'd prefer a free market electrical company, where if some disabled woman couldn't pay her bills in January in Montana, they'd say tough shit, cut the electricity off and let her literally freeze to death? Oh, but that god we're better than that. And SS is not bankrupt. It's a myth. But it will be if we keep dipping into it for a pointless war effort.