FCC Votes To Punish Comcast 188
MaineCoasts brings news that three out of the five FCC commissioners have voted in favor of punishing Comcast for their P2P throttling practices. The investigation of Comcast has been underway since January, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made clear their conclusion a couple weeks ago. Ars Technica has coverage as well, noting:
"The initial report on the vote said nothing about which way Republican commissioners McDowell and Tate might lean. FCC watchers wouldn't be at all surprised to see both vote against the order; the really interesting moment could come if they support it. Having four or even five commissioners support the order would send a strong bipartisan signal to ISPs that they need to take great care with any sort of discriminatory throttling based on anything more specific than a user's total bandwidth."
Re:alignment (Score:5, Insightful)
So whose side is the FCC on? they seem pretty two-faced to me.
Mmmmh... a contradictory double-sided bias.. what could it possibly mean... maybe... I don't know.. a lack of bias?
Re:"Throttling" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I don't agree with a lot of what they do, and they do have considerable power, but power that's not unlike that of the EPA, the military, and so on.
So is the Comcast pending fine a good idea? You bet. Once the pandora's box of stepping on protocols to favor another is open, it can't be shut. This sends a great signal to carriers that they'd best not fool with consumer access. Be a good carrier; don't mess with protocols to favor your own perceived traffic. Controversial no doubt; a good one this time, IMHO.
Laws are legal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that convenient? The will of the people will be done, and the will of the people is that douchebag corporations don't abuse the people after being gifted billions of the peoples' tax dollars to build network infrastructure.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not a legislative arm. It has broad legislated enforcement mandates from Congress, going back to the early-mid 1930s on communications policy and enforcement.
Yes, exactly. Enforcement. Not legislative. We agree.
So is the Comcast pending fine a good idea? You bet. Once the pandora's box of stepping on protocols to favor another is open, it can't be shut. This sends a great signal to carriers that they'd best not fool with consumer access.
And then, frustratingly, you turn right around and are happy(!) that they go power drunk and implement network neutrality in direct violation of THE LAW. Do you not see the problem with this? Do you think your local police should be able to create new laws and ignore others?
That you like the new law they created out of nothing should be irrelevant. Think about the fact they think they can do anything they want.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it not at least an equally huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that it is "absolutely legal?"
Packet forging is rightly named---Comcast sends them as if they originated from me, when they did not. They do not advertise that they do it & I did not sign any document authorizing them to do it on my behalf. In fact, many AUPs prohibit forging and spoofing from their users & ISPs should be held to an even higher standard.
Re:"Throttling" (Score:5, Insightful)
I call bullshit on this.
The cable companies allow access to their networks based on MAC. What you are doing is possible, but you would need to call comcast and tell them that you got a new modem every time, which would look extremely suspicious. MAC addresses are also not random. So you cannot spoof it to a "random" MAC.
Your post also lacks continuity. You say that they start dropping "30-80%" of your packets every "5-10 minutes". But you also say that you only need to reset your MAC every 2 days?
please go Home [digg.com]
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:4, Insightful)
I AM a Republican and I'm on the FCC's side.
It's debatable whether or not Comcast's conduct was legal. They advertised and sold "internet access". That has certain connotations. If instead of the promised "Internet Access" they sold a neutered version thereof, then they may have run afoul of Federal regulations.
LK
Tiered bandwidth is not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Tiered or capped bandwidth is not the problem here. Net Neutrality is the problem.
The most fundamental way to distinguish between the two is that violations of Net Neutrality will lead to tying between different relevant markets, a critical Antitrust concern.
Tiered or capped bandwidth ALREADY EXISTS at Comcast, and has been around since the days of Compuserve and timeshared systems.
AT&T in the 1980s could charge you for every minute you were on the phone, but they sure as hell couldn't tell you that you could only call their preferred pizza delivery services. I hope you can see why that matters.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what this is about. Comcast was found by the FCC to be interfering in the traffic of specific application types, violating principles established by the FCC to allow customers open access to the Internet. The customers were not charged for the bits that were blocked, so it had nothing to do with bandwidth caps.
Ok, what? They were not charged for the blocked data? Are you nuts?
As a customer you are paying for XMb/sec download by yMb/sec upload on their network, not taking account of the fact that those speeds will be affected by traffic on other networks and the actual speed of the server, you still are paying for that bandwidth continuously.
If they are messing with your traffic and/or reducing your connection speeds on their network then they are not giving you the service you payed for. And they are violating federal law that prohibits ISPs from discriminating against data types.
It would be like the phone company blocking calls from an area that a lot of people call or intentionally reducing call quality to lower the number of calls from there.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
it's a huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that forged packets are some sort of illegal impersonation.
So you won't mind if I send some mail and list yours as the return address then?
Re:alignment (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, the body of FCC commissioners is designed to be double-sided [wikipedia.org].
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that the commission makes biased decisions all the time. The Republican commissioners are almost always unified, and the Democrat commissioners seem to swing over to the "regulation is bad, m'kay" position a lot of the time.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:3, Insightful)
The FCC is -- and should be -- both an enforcement and legislative arm of the Government.
The FCC is mostly an interpretive arm of government, with *limited* ability to extend and enforce *existing* law. The cannot create new law out of whole cloth.
Now as to whether Net Neutrality is "already law", you would need to define what you mean by "law".
You seemed to have missed all the ongoing debate about network neutrality among the government. Apparently the real legislature does not believe that network neutrality is existing law.
But hey, it's not surprising for me to see a subject line like "The Republicans Are Correct" spouted by someone who appears to know little about the law. (Law student.)
Well, Mr. Student, you appear to have the attorney arrogance down already, if not the understanding of the concept of limited power.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you have the crux of the matter.
The FCC is authorized by law (see the nineteen additions to the Communications Act of 1935 as amended) to set and execute this policy. Good thing their nipple wasn't showing, eh?
Re:It looks good, but its not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, AT&T, Standard Oil, and a few other examples come to mind... plus, if you run a small business and have ever dealt with OSHA, you'll have plenty of other more modern examples ready.
Bear in mind those were pretty progressive governments at time compared to society. Unless you think having a single company determine the price of oil and force you to rent your phone for an arbitrary price is a good thing.
In truth some of our government regulation for small businesses is asinine, but letting single or a select few corporations run the economy is just as bad as having a government planned economy (aka Soviet Union).
If Comcast doesn't want to deal with government regulation now, I'd say it would be fair if they gave back the tax money they got for infrastructure development on public lands back from the telecommunications acts during the 90s.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
No, not in "that" way, or any other way. If I have Comcast, and I don't download anything (I don't surf, I don't IM, I don't email, I don't use my connection) for a month... what is my bill going to be? Now, after I've returned home from living at my girlfriend's for that month, I decide to upload a bunch of videos we made to youtube, and I'm downloading a ton of other things I think she will find "cute" (since VLC will save video streams onto your harddrive)... and I do that every day for another month.. what will my bill be now?
Guess what.... the bill will be the same for both months.
Now, with time warner AND comcast sending out those TCP kill packets... all that happens is your connection burps for a moment. You never notice it when you are surfing, you might notice it when YouTubing, and you will definitely notice it if you are downloading torrents. Although, if you aren't torrenting, you won't be sent TCP kill packets.
People are all like "I paid for the connection. I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" Where did this attitude come from? Who thinks that they can do whatever they want with whatever they buy?More often than not, there are restrictions of use on what you purchase. You cannot buy a baseball bat and then legally go beat your neighbor with it. Sure, they don't need to put a warning label on it. How about an aerosol can? They come all kinds of restrictions on the back, that if you are caught doing one of those restricted activities, you face a penalty. Ok. Why aren't you arguing about how your ISP doesn't protect your anonymity when you surf child porn sites? Because that is sick and damaging to children? How much of a hypocrite does that make you? It's Ok for an ISP to restrict some access and traffic.. but NOT when it interferes with what you want to do?
Come ON!
Re:Finally!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
The restrictions on aerosol cans were placed there by the government.
Comcast blocking/throttling illegal things is one debate, but deciding to hinder one type of traffic because they don't like it is a different issue.
ISPs, when offering unlimited service, especially considering that they like to claim is unlimited because nothing is blocked, not unlimited bandwidth -- so they can get away with throttling, should not be allowed to hinder things they don't like without legal grounds for doing so.
Re:"Throttling" (Score:3, Insightful)
FCC no longer an "expert agency"; now political (Score:4, Insightful)
What this result shows is that the FCC, which has driven away all of its best technical people during the past eight years, is now purely a political organization. And because the law requires a 3-2 partisan split among the Commissioners, it means that most of its decisions will be influenced by partisan politics rather than what's best for the people.
If the Chairman and the two other Commissioners of the same party agree on something, it sails right through. (This is what happened with travesties such as the Sirius-XM merger.) However, if the Chairman is motivated to support an agenda to which the other party subscribes, he can expect the two Commissioners of that party to fall into lockstep due to partisanship. That's what happened here. McDowell and Tate, the Republicans, want (as McDowell put it) to "let engineers solve engineering problems." But the Democrats, beseiged by the left-leaning Democratic lobbyists of Free Press, voted to regulate the Internet both because of the Democrats' inherent desire to regulate and because they swallowed the falsehoods of their fellow partisans at Free Press uncritically. So, if the Chairman was willing to support the same result, it would happen.
The question, of course, is why Martin -- a Republican -- would be pro-regulation. I do not know Kevin Martin, but several theories have been floated on various blogs. The first is that the Chairman was feeling pressure from Congress. (He was on the hot seat less than a month ago before a Congressional subcommittee which strongly suggested that if he did not regulate, they'd take matters out of his hands.) The second is that he is "anti-cable," and -- regardless of what harm he might do to the Internet -- wanted to take a swipe at Comcast. (Some bloggers have speculated that Martin is bucking for a job as a telephone company executive or board member when he retires from the Commission, and so is giving those companies the quid pro quo for obtaining such a post. I certainly hope that this is not the case, but then, I do not know him.)
Many people have also noted that the slates of panelists at the two hearings on network management were stacked against Comcast. In Boston, the ratio was about 2:1; at Stanford, it was 6:1. Since the Chairman picks the panelists (the other Commissioners can offer advice, but he need not take it), the fact that even the first hearing was heavily stacked against Comcast suggests that the Chairman or his staff may have had a predisposition to rule against Comcast from the start.
In any event, the fact that only one witness at either hearing was actually engaged in business as an ISP strongly suggests that politics, not engineering facts, would rule the day. And they did. The lobbyists and lawyers of Free Press, an inside-the-Beltway lobbying group which spent more than $700,000 on various Internet agendas in 2007 alone, repeated statements which were simply technically false again and again until the Commissioners believed them. And little guys like my own independent ISP? We got 8 -- count them -- 8 -- minutes to talk. This is not promising for the future of the Internet. If it's dominated by politics, and especially by an agency which has lost its technical compass and rules on the basis of politics and partisanship -- the Internet is in trouble.