Comcast Sued Again over P2P Throttling 73
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica brings us news of a disgruntled Washington D.C. Comcast customer who has filed a lawsuit against Comcast over claims of false advertising. The complaint seeks punitive damages, class-action status, and attorneys' fees. The customer claims Comcast advertised 'unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer.' We discussed a similar lawsuit brought against Comcast by a Californian customer back in November, as well as the FCC investigation into Comcast's practices. While Comcast confirmed reception of the new lawsuit, they declined to comment on it directly. Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'"
But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Their spokesman gets an A for confusing the issue.
Re:No, they don't block them (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
This is why any net neutrality proposal that allows traffic shaping is utterly worthless. Because an ISP can then take any protocol they like and throttle it back to one byte every ten centuries, and then say "...but we're allowed to do traffic shaping, your honour"
Re:They just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
You can buy your natural gas from one provider and have it delivered by the one with the local monopoly on the pipes. Why can't we do this with internet connections?
Re:Better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as it's over 0%, the percentage doesn't matter. The point is, they're supposed to be a common carrier and route the damn packets. Customers and services that customers pay to use rely on ISPs adhering to standards. And please, don't make Comcast out to be some great defender of the Copyright. They're only doing this to save their stockholders money- nothing more.
Besides, piracy existed (and still does) well before the Torrent protocol. HTTP, IRC, SMTP, and FTP are all still used to transfer files in violation of copyright. Should Comcast throttle these indiscriminately as well? Where do you draw the line?
Re:legitimate use for p2p (Score:1, Insightful)
Guns should be banned because they are sometimes used for violence.
Cars should be banned because alcoholics kill people in them.
CD/DVD-Burners should be banned because people can copy movies/music.
etc
etc