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."
Comcast's likely reaction to any FCC "punishment": (Score:5, Funny)
Comcast (Score:5, Funny)
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Everybody who modded parent "Funny" thinks he's making a joke, heh.
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Comcast wouldn't monitor /., they know sucking up to us for a little PR is hopeless on this forum.
"Throttling" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Throttling" (Score:4, Insightful)
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I can confirm this. I once posted how cozy my job position was to find how management reads slashdot themselves. Think like a spy if you want to be sneaky, because they are the ones making the rules.
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]
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It used to be that if I changed the computer connected to my cable modem, I had to call in to register the MAC address of the new system. Apparently they got fed up with the hassle of all the calls, so they changed the system to allow any MAC, eliminating the need to call. At least that's true of Comcast in some areas. It's not true of all cable providers, though.
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That was more than likely an attempt to enforce the "only one computer can be connected to this modem" policy (it used to be in the Eula).
The cable companies DO track the MAC address on your modem. That is why if you go and buy a new one you have to register it, and why the discourage buying used ones.
If they weren't tracking by the MAC on the modem, messing with things would be as easy as the parent post suggests, which it isn't.
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You are wrong (Score:2)
I was a Comcrap customer for years before I switched to FIOS. You can change your router's MAC as often as you like, and you do indeed get a new IP address. You seem to be confused between the cable modem and the router. Please turn in your geek card at the desk on your way out.
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The sandvine devices are far enough upstream that I don't think they see your modems MAC, in fact i'd be surprised if they can even associate an IP address with a given user. This is reinforced by the fact that after doing some BT traffic and my connection starts sucking wind, just rebooting the modem and getting a new IP address and things run like normal again, appologies to the poor smuck that got my old IP address and my old sucky connection.
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Thanks for reporting the problem and solution. We will implement it as soon as possible.
- Comcast
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Punishment enough (Score:5, Funny)
Punishment enough would be for the FCC to require Comcast to double the capacity of their network every 18 months.
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Good first step, now to the telecoms... (Score:2)
Im glad that our elected officials are taking meaningful, important and proper steps to curb wrongful practices by large businesses. Hopefully they will go after the phone companies ne--oh that's right, nevermind.
It looks good, but its not. (Score:3, Interesting)
The FCC are yes men/women.
They're only doing this so Comcast doesnt have to look like the bad guy, when they lower their bandwidth per month usage. This is so they can say "Well the FCC wont let us throttle P2P users, so we're going to raise prices for high bandwidth users, and cut bandwidth for everyone at the current rate"
The government would never do anything to hurt a corporation.
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Fine then. Would you rather have a 'pay more for high-bandwidth no-throttled connection' or 'ultra fast connection cheap! (note: we won't let you use it in ways we don't like)'
I know what I want.
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:It looks good, but its not. (Score:5, Informative)
"The government would never do anything to hurt a corporation."
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.
While it's certainly true that the government supports corporate interests from time to time, it would behoove you to understand why it happens instead of making blanket assumptions.
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.
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Hate to burst your bubble, but after standard oil broke up, it split into a bunch of "Standard Oil of the state of ______".
S.O. New Jersey became Exxon, New York became Mobil, and they became ExxonMobil, the world's most profitable corporation.
The rest of the Standard Oils:
Standard Oil of California bought Kenucky and Ohio and became Chevron, then they bought Gulf Oil and Texaco, became ChevronTexaco, then dropped the Texaco to be "Chevron".
Standard Oil of Indiana eventually became Amoco, merged with the An
Well, they deserve it. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you sell something you don't own (bandwidth), then it's your fault, not the buyers.
What's really needed is QoS. You get X MB per month of high quality, Y MB per month at medium quality and Z MB (maybe z=inf) at low quality, and a final unlimited lowest quality, throttled down to something quite small.
Your app sets the QoS level it wants (eg voip sets high quality). When you run out of the quality level set, traffic automatically gets demoted to the next one you have. Or, you can buy more a la carte.
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I agree with your posting for the most part - however, the QOS rules shouldn't by default throttle the lowest queue to neverneverland by itself.
I've done some work with QOS and in a large implementation, we do around 10 percent limitation for VoIP as well as another 1-5 percent for managment/inter switch communication. We give normal traffic a max of 90 percent on the wire. This way you're not starving applications if there's bandwidth to spare within the network; however it does guarantee that there is a
the vote hasn't happened yet (Score:5, Informative)
"The Wall Street Journal reports tonight that commissioners Copps, Adelstein, and Martin have decided against the cable giant, paving the way for an official vote when the order is publicly voted on next Friday."
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Since when has Slashdot let mere facts stand in the way of a good headline?
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Mmmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
This ruling will never stand (Score:5, Funny)
All Comcast needs to do to get this overturned is find a judge that isn't a Comcast customer.
Nice change of tactics... (Score:3, Funny)
Instead of fining a single boob, the FCC moved up to fining plural boobs. Business as usual.
When did the FCC start regulating the Internet? (Score:2)
This is a serious question. As a user of the Internet, naturally I don't want my ISP throttling my connection based on my surfing habits, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the government getting involved here.
Now, given that cable companies typically operate with a government granted monopoly to run cables to people's houses, it is perfectly reasonable that perhaps they have some obligations to go with that monopoly, but I'm not aware of any such obligations in legislation at this time. On what legal
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Comcast in fact has claimed that the FCC in fact does not have authority to regulate the Internet. See its filing with the FCC [fcc.gov] regarding this, and its followup here [fcc.gov].
The recent decision in CBS v. FCC (the "wardrobe malfunction" case) may also bear on this decision [bennett.com]. The court struck down the FCC's ruling against CBS, saying that the FCC couldn't just make up the rules as it went along! Normally, the FCC promulgates rules by posting a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking," takes comments, and only then creates rul
Water water everywhere, nor any drop to regulate (Score:2)
Some kind of exception is in order. Or perhaps it's already there and it just needs a clarification so everyone can see it better.
Remember that the internet is a series of tubes. The ISPs are the pipework, the customers' systems are sinks and reservoirs, and the act of running an "application" is turning on a spigot either to send liquid from your own reservoir to someone else's sink, or to draw liquid from someone else's reservoir to your own sink. The regulations only enforce unrestricted flow through the
Dishes piling up - Yuck! (Score:2)
FCC should be punishing the govt instead (Score:2)
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.
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Which statements do you believe were technically false?
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It's Not Punishment (Score:2)
It's data traffic, for god's sake! (Score:2)
DATA TRAFFIC.
Jesus fusking chribt on a pony; Bandwidth is speed. Data traffic is amount of data transfered.
That's all well and good... (Score:2)
...but how about forcing them to open up the ports they block to my mail server while they are at it? I'm paying for access to the internet. I'll take care of my own firewalling, thanks.
chain them! whip them! make them like customers! (Score:2)
oh, okay, just the chains and whips, then. we know the last part ain't going to happen.
but if you are going to require open access, as the web wants, and free passage of data without some busybody in the back room dinking with it, as the customer wants, the best way to encourage the others is to whack the guy you first catch. hard.
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If that's what it's about, then this belongs in civil court, as a class action suit, not a bureaucratic ruling.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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Since blocked data still eats up a users connection speed, and higher connection speed service costs more money, then in that way customers were charged for blocked data. They may not have had the blocked data counted against their upload/download limit but they did effectively get downgraded to a lesser connection speed for the same price. Rather than the telephone analogy I think of this as ordering and paying for a Corvette and getting a Chevy Ma
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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
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I don't think people buy a connection thinking they can do what they want, but they do buy a connection frequently based on promised bandwidth (which to my mind, is pretty much tacit approval by at least the marketing arms of ISPs that you can download what you like). When someone sells a connection promising blazing speeds and then it turns out that the company is then pretty much shaping the traffic to eliminate those blazing speeds for damned near any application that could use it, then I'd say the cust
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It doesn't work out that way though. I'll see that blazing speed if I download the linux ISOs via an HTTP link, or from an FTP site. Of course, if anything were to go wrong while I'm downloading that 700mb to 3gb.. then I'm out of luck and I have to download it all over again. However, I"ll see plenty of blazing speed.
Sure, I could and probably should get a download assist program like GetRight... or maybe I should even start using BitComet and have it intercept the clicks... but even then, some servers
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I'll see that blazing speed if I download the linux ISOs via an HTTP link, or from an FTP site.
No you will not, those files are to big to get much out of the "powerboost", my last system update was on a comcast connection and today the KDE update came in in the neighborhood of 375 Kbs, but the files under 2MB flew in around 1.5Gbs. What cable ISPs hate is uploads, it kills their systems, they are happy when you download a 1000 times more than you upload.
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You cannot buy a baseball bat and then legally go beat your neighbor with it.
The legality of what your intending to do with the bat is irrelevant to the legality of it's purchase, they are completely separate issues. One could just as easily argue that the baseball bat manufacturer's refusal to sell to someone intending to perform illegal activities with the bat is obstructing justice by preventing criminal activities for the police to arrest criminals for!
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Yeah, and the costs of going to court shouldn't be prohibitive to a small consumer such that large corporations can get their way simply by threatening long drawn out legal proceedings.
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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: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.
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So whose side is the FCC on? they seem pretty two-faced to me.
As always, they are on the side of the administrations loyal pets, the incumbent telcos.
Re:alignment (Score:4, Informative)
Telcos? You're talking like they were plural. Yeah, Ma Bell was forcefully split up, but what has happened since is that all the baby bells have merged again, like metallic droplets flowing together to reform a blasted monster. With the SBC/AT&T merger, the monster is back with a vengeance.
Re:alignment (Score:4, Informative)
hat has happened since is that all the baby bells have merged again
It is definitely going that way, but they aren't quite there yet. They haven't ALL merged together again.
After the breakup, there were 7 "baby bells". There are now 3 left: AT&T, Qwest, and Verizon.
- AT&T is SBC renamed after SBC acquired AT&T. SBC (formerly Southwest Bell) also acquired the baby bells Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, and BellSouth.
- Qwest was an independent which became a de facto baby bell when it acquired U S West.
- Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic) acquired baby bell NYNEX.
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No it isn't legal. They deliberately forged messages ( RST packages ) that were sent over the phone lines. That is a federal crime.
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No it isn't legal. They deliberately forged messages ( RST packages ) that were sent over the phone lines. That is a federal crime.
Yes, I've heard that theory, but it's a huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that forged packets are some sort of illegal impersonation. I don't like what Comcast did, but I also don't like using abusing unrelated laws.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Informative)
It's not at all a stretch.. thats' why they call them "Forged Packets"
They *very clearly* do not come from the source that compcast pretends they come from.
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:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Funny)
> Is it not at least an equally huge, if not ridiculous, stretch to claim that it is "absolutely legal?"
How about 'barely legal'?
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How about 'barely legal'?
more like patently illegal but they figure they could dazzle a jury with enough bullshit to get a "reasonable doubt"
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?
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This apologist argument is absolutely disgusting because it fails to take into account a few things. First that Comcast from the very beginning denied doing anything. Next it's that Comcast continually would change its story depending on which part of the damn beast you spoke to. Finally it's that they w
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Impersonation laws were not written and were not intended to cover subtle technical distinctions.
You mean a subtle technical distinction like when a lawyer and president stated he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinski because fellatio isn't sex? Subtle technical distinctions are the stock and trade of both the legal and the regulatory trades and both tend to attract narcissistic assholes.
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Whether or not they are illegal I wouldn't know, not being versed in US law. However, that they are impersonation is beyond doubt. After all, Comcast sent them with the "sender" field set to a third-party participant in a particular exchange with the deliberate attempt to deceive the receiver of the packet to think that it came from said third party. Furthermore, this
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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.
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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(!
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Ok. Cite the law. They have the leeway. They can do this legally. It is their congressional mandate to do so; it's policy. Not every action taken by every agency needs to have a bunch of congress people dictating their every move and boundary. It's ok to develop policy; it's done every day in government and done so (often) with success for all parties considered. Sometimes it's awful, like Bush's meddling with the FDA and EPA. It's called trust within defined boundaries. They really can't do anything they
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Ok. Cite the law.
Do you believe that anything that is allowed must be allowed by law? No, the onus is on you to cite the law that Comcast violated by not embracing network neutrality. And yes, I understand that the way they did was controversial, but as near as I can tell, that's not why the FCC is acting.
And no, I think it's reasonable that I have to file suit to keep federal agencies from going crazy and doing something that is clearly beyond their authority. And it's clearly beyond it because the legis
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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?
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I don't know about GP, but it seems that you do think so. Otherwise, maybe you'd say what law it is that makes it illegal to implement network neutrality instead of trying to avoid the question.
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Thus begin most terrible trends...
FCC should be working harder to allow more competition — and to prevent the existing ISPs from colluding with each other: "We'll do this, if all of you do too — let's not compete on it.")
The meting out punishment for a particular practice the government is rather micro-managing.
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RIGHT!
If you shut down torrents, what else do you shutdown next??? Do you stop the NetFlix pipe because it competes with your own or business partner offerings!??!!?
No!
And that's what this enforcement sends a message about-- net neutrality must remain.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:4, Interesting)
Your sense of legality and illegality are the crux for a need to understand more than I can explain in this forum. Competition means unfettered pipes, which is what the FCC is ostensibly punishing Comcast for-- non-"net neutrality".
And I haven't been called kid in over 40 years!
Additionally, after 14 books, and heaven-only-knows how many articles I've written, I've discovered that my choice of communications is my own, and those that would not understand emphasis via punctuation are looney. Two days ago, it was my choice of the word gendarme-- meaning policeman. Someone believed that the only correct use had to do with syntax connoting only French and only military policing.... all here on /.
You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts. There.
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At each opportunity, fight it or the Internet is doomed to support only a carrier's application by priority. It's that simple, not that the bribes to the campaign funds, lobbying efforts, and so on won't be tough to fight. Keep fighting. It's all we can do as greed motivations won't stop, either.
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:4, Informative)
I'm going to assume for the moment that you do not have a legal education. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The FCC is -- and should be -- both an enforcement and legislative arm of the Government. This is because it is an ADMINISTRATIVE body created by CONGRESS. Congress delegated [limited] rulemaking and ordermaking power to the FCC. That's not unusual: go look at the Enabling Acts of the other administrative agencies who handle a huge chunk of the rest of the way our Government functions. The Supreme Court has upheld the Constitutionality of agencies like the FCC again and again.
Now as to whether Net Neutrality is "already law", you would need to define what you mean by "law". Court made law? Statutes? Agency rules/orders? You do see the title of this, "FCC Votes to Punish Comcast" right? Guess what -- that's the action of the law. You may think the "law" is purely statutory, but then you'd be leaving out the Constitution, administrative bodies, common law, executive orders.
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.)
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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 neu
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:5, Informative)
The FCC can make law within the bounds of its enabling act. Rulemaking and orders have the force of law. The FCC can't pass a rule that forces ignorant people to actually learn about the law before they speak, but they can create an order to punish Comcast, and they can make rules regarding network neutrality. You can go read the enabling act at: http://law.onecle.com/uscode/47/151.html [onecle.com]
If it is arrogant to point out how wrong you are, then anyone with any education must seem arrogant to you. I guess that's the "liberal elite" hate we see from Republicans. Your statements are just as annoying as someone who comes to Slashdot apparently not knowing shit about computers, but still wants to talk like they do. Do yourself a favor and stop seeing knowledge as arrogance. It's not my job to coddle your ignorance.
And in regards to whether the "real legislature does not believe that network neutrality is existing law", there again you are clueless. Go read up on Antitrust law (tying), or the policy statement in section 230 of the CDA. Congress has been quite clear, throughout its history, that preserving competition is more important than preserving competitors, and that the Internet in particular deserves preservation as a free market.
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If it is arrogant to point out how wrong you are, then anyone with any education must seem arrogant to you. I guess that's the "liberal elite" hate we see from Republicans.
I give up. You're determined to read what you want to read, rather than what I actually say. Probably something to do with your frothing, foaming prejudiced hatred of just having the word "Republican" mentioned.
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Congress has been quite clear, throughout its history, that preserving competition is more important than preserving competitors
then congress has departed from its history:
the dmca
the net act
the pro ip act
the pro-pirate act
ausfta, cafta, acta
if they did this 100 years ago it would be illegal to make, buy, or own a car. There would be a tax on every bicycle to be distributed to buggy whip manufacturers, and the natonal association of buggy whip producers would be allowed to regulate the roads, and the manufacture of all buggies, and related buggy accessories.
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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.
Yes, but the war powers act and Global War on Terror allows for the FCC to make their own laws targeted at specific organizations. At least that is the way I intpret it... or am I thinking of something else?
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
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:4, Informative)
"Regardless of your stand on Network Neutrality, the fact of the matter is that what Comcast did was absolutely legal."
I don't think that has been established. Actively forging packets may qualify as an act of impersonation, which might be considered illegal. This may or may not be the case, but I suggest that the legality of what Comcast did is not yet a 'fact'.
A.
Re:The Republicans are correct (Score:4, Informative)
Consequently the FCC is (rather surprisingly, I admit) enforcing the law as written. That's actually a good thing.
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I consider that in politics, the two major parties serve the same function that guilds used to serve in commerce. The purpose of a guild was to lock out competition by raising the barrier to entry. That
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