Comcast-NBC Deal Accidentally Protects Internet? 99
jfruhlinger writes "Details of the conditions that the Department of Justice required to approve Comcast's purchase of NBC have emerged today. Blogger Kevin Fogarty looks at the details — Comcast is forbidden from blocking Netflix over its pipes, and must sell NBC shows via iTunes and other similar services — and concludes that Internet access for everybody, including business users, has been protected, more or less by accident."
Re:Not at all (Score:5, Interesting)
What this actually does is accept the fact that a corporate merger can specify what is blocked and what isn't. This is actually a dangerous trend for network neutrality, because we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
The article certainly doesn't paint it that way. FTFA:
Still, in approving the deal, federal officials attached dozens of conditions, including several big ones to protect Internet video: Comcast must sell its content to online video services. That gives them access to marquee NBC Universal programming. Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network. That means that it cannot prevent its subscribers from accessing Netflix and other Web video services, or slow down traffic from these services to make them jerky, unreliable and hard to watch. Comcast must sell stand-alone Internet access at a reasonable price, without tying it to a cable TV package, to enable cord-cutting. That includes offering a standard 6-megabit-per-second plan, which is fast enough to handle Internet video, for roughly $50 a month.
The phrase "Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network." Sounds pretty universal to me. I just hope the author wasn't paraphrasing a document that specified Internet video only from certain providers and not others, i.e. youtube, netflix, hulu, etc.
Re:Not at all (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems you, the blogger and the Justice Department missed the entirely more insidious, but far more realistic way that Comcast is going to control what content is being accessed: user-based billing. Start with a plan for - oh, $20. Everything is accessible at full speed. Make it something juicy like 20 mbit per second. Then add user-based billing, and a soft cap at 50 GB. And finally, the coup-de-grace: the cap limit does not apply to Comcast owned and operated sites, but applies to Netflix, Youtube, etc.
What do you get? Everyone's surfing along happily for the first week, and then bam! - the download cap hits. Suddenly, that cap free site for Comcast shows looks mighty good. And Netflix might as well serve video at 320x240 resolution in a 56 kbit/sec stream, because that's all they'll ever be able to show anymore to Comcast users.
It's beautiful, isn't it? Comcast doesn't do a single thing to its traffic. The entire Internet is accessible. It's not even throttled. But the users will, en masse, flock to its sites and desert anything that's not on the basic, cap-free plan. And thanks to the monopolies and duopolies that Comcast enjoys, many end-users won't even have the option to switch to something better.
We're fucked. We've left the best times of the Internet behind us.