FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Blocks BitTorrent 303
master_p writes "The FCC's formally issued draft net neutrality regulations have a huge copyright loophole in them; a loophole that would theoretically permit Comcast to block BitTorrent just like it did in 2007 — simply by claiming that it was 'reasonable network management' intended to 'prevent the unlawful transfer of content.' The new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent, even if these ISP practices end up inflicting collateral damage on perfectly lawful content and activities."
Re:let me fix that for you (Score:1, Informative)
both are correct.....
well... (Score:3, Informative)
Here you go, your neutrality regulations,
bought and paid for by your local, friendly *AA.
no no, no need to give thanks, they're here for you.
Re:well... (Score:3, Informative)
bought and paid for by your local, friendly *AA.
What, you didn't think that all that Hollywood support for the Democratic Party came without strings attached, did you?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
At a guess, the entity with the largest transfer of legal BitTorrent feeds is Blizzard software; it's the primary distribution method for World of Warcraft updates.
In fact, unless the user is knowledgeable, they won't know any other way to get said updates. The game's launcher automatically detects when a new version of the game is available (because it's an MMORPG, the client needs to be updated when the servers are updated), and launches Blizzard's BitTorrent downloader.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Turbine's games use BitTorrent as well.
Re:We told you. (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. As we all know, it's only government intervention that causes a monopoly or cartel to form in the first place. Left to itself, a market would never do this, because companies are far too nice and dumb, and would rather compete fairly for equal shares of the market than bribe and blackmail their customers to completely screw over and crush their competitors.
Also, my doorbell just rang - it's Alyson Hannigan, naked and horny. Riding a pink unicorn. It's OK though - she brought her Evil Twin along for you.
Re:This will harm legal sharing (Score:3, Informative)
There are already torrenting services like this (Seedm8.com I think - don't want to visit that link from my work machine).
Effectively you can manage your torrents on that system with a web interface. Upload a file to their server and tell it to seed and it'll seed for you. Or, upload a torrent and it'll download it to your account on the remote system via P2P services where you can then download directly from their server and then delete the file.
To your ISP you're not using P2P at all.
Re:We told you. (Score:3, Informative)
EFF Petition (Score:3, Informative)
You can sign the petition here: http://www.realnetneutrality.org/ [realnetneutrality.org]
Claims to be part of the EFF's effort and it's linked to directly on their site.
Re:We told you. (Score:5, Informative)
In most urban areas, gas stations are a dime a dozen, and each intersection probably has two or three. Yet, you'll find for blocks on end, every gas station has the exact same price, maybe wavering a tiny bit. And that prices always seem to jump in unison, and fall very slowly. Yet this can exist without any form of price cartel among stations.
Simply put, what happens is a station wants more profit, so it bumps up the price. Each station nearby sees that, then decide they want more profit, so they bump up their price in short order as well. There may be times when one station refuses to cooperate and keeps prices low, but the other stations get business simply because the price difference isn't worth having to drive to the other station when you're already at the more expensive station. But eventually they'll give in and raise their price too since there doesn't seem to be any harm to business.
This really cracked me up. First of all, the profit made on gas at a gas station is about 3% at it's best, the supplier gets 5%-7%. Secondly, There are laws stating that we can't be more than 2 cents away from our closest competitor, we can only change prices once every 24 hours, and there is a cap on how much the price can go up per day (I think it's 6 cents, but this isn't really ever an issue). All of this went info effect during the oil crisis.