FCC Chief Clarifies His Statement On Comcast 38
netizenz writes "At a press conference yesterday, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has clarified his earlier statements on Comcast. According to the CircleID post by Richard Bennett, he 'will not seek a fine against Comcast. Rather, he will simply impose some reporting requirements on them and order them to do what they've already started to do, phase out the current traffic management system in favor of an application-agnostic one. This is second story in a row where the AP have got the facts backwards. Hence, both sides may now officially claim victory.'"
By "clarification" he means (Score:5, Insightful)
Retroactively revising his position on order of the big bosses, since they didn't like his first one.
typical (Score:3, Insightful)
layers of fact checkers (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like Corporate America had a talk with him. (Score:5, Insightful)
Act tough against Corporations and some one higher up says "look dick bag, you're only here cause i put you here, so dont get fucking cocky you little peice of shit... You will do nothing."
So now comcast gets a blow job from the FCC rather than a strict ruling from our government.
Lovely. Did you really expect anything to ever happen to comcast? You do realize that these companies get away with murder... and you dont.
Re:Any bets he got a call from someone "important" (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah. The FCC will brutally and efficiently prosecute anyone who is not a big business with well placed lobbyists, and a constituency that relies on the jobs these big businesses provide. Open up a pirate radio station and watch what happens. You will find the FCC on your doorstep quickly, and they will have no mercy.
Now, if your a big company like Comcast, have no fear. You'll just have to do some "reporting" which is pretty stupid since elected officials and their supporting staff have no idea what those reports would even mean.
Re:Any bets he got a call from someone "important" (Score:2, Insightful)
For something as big as traffic shaping for millions of people therefore attacking their freedom (and maybe privacy) I would just put the fuckheads in charge in jail until someone with enough common sense runs it. The same with Sony's rootkit and whatever Microsoft has been doing
Re:Traffic shaping is ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic shaping is ok (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the dirty secret is that their previous strategy- deep pack inspection as a way to enforce non neutrality- doesn't work very well anyway.
The problem is you have to keep fiddling with it- which costs money, and your customers always outnumber you, and usually outsmart you.
Deep packet inspection works well if you're playing *with* the customers. So if it's a way for the customers to say- I value this packet particularly highly, and the ISP follows along- that's fine (and the ISP of course checks that you are only marking *some* of your packets high priority, according to some contractual agreement that the customer paid for, like so many hours VOIP high priority a month or whatever)
It's if the ISP is deliberately shaping one particular protocol or class of protocols. In that case the customer will come up with ever-more-creative ways for one packet stream to look like another enitrely.