What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing

The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

You're like all the developers I work with in cube land. Sometimes the truth we can implement in the real world is not the same truth that exists in your mind. This is *ok*. It doesn't mean we have failed. It just means we are making progress. And pro

I don't need notches in my gun

I need ammo!

Re:

I was gonna mention that too. It doesn't make sense. You fire guns and put notches in belts, right? I've never heard of a notch in a gun. Anyway, nothing's going to come out of this except maybe the FCC banning Comcast employees from using steroids.

Ars brings the Audio

Ars Technica's article included MP3 Audio [arstechnica.com] clippings of the hearing.

Comcast sucks

Andy Oram links to his older article [lxer.com] (which he says is still relevant) where he blames the current situation on other things as well:

1 ) Bell telephone companies.

2) Congress

3) dot-com commerce sites.

4) Internet2

5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."

I don't know. I myself can see all those as part of the big problem, of course, but I'd rather just point my finger at guys like this:

Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen: "I don't think we're restraining the customers from using the service in accordance with the way we're selling [sticking] it to them."

Re:Comcast sucks

I'm not sure who Andy Oram is other than a blogger for Oreily, but his blaming of the dot com ecoms and the internet 2 are incredibly lame. He might as well have blamed Atilla the Hun, for all the relevance.

Re:Comcast sucks

5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."

As long as the majority of the American public has access to Youtube and Myspace (and now Facebook), they're largely happy campers, apathetic to every other aspect of the internet, especially the technical ones or the ones that require any amount of thought. It's just like television; as long as there's American Idol and Lost, everybody's happy. Nobody cares about matters of substance like what's being reported on the major news outlets.

Re:Comcast sucks

Nobody cares about matters of substance like what's being reported on the major news outlets.

They report on matters of substance on the news channels? When did this start?

it's simple

I'm actually for network neutrality: I think ISPs shouldn't try to manage traffic based on content or destination.

But if they can't cap BitTorrent, they have to cap volume, and I expect that's what's going to happen.

Re:it's simple

...or option 3, they can charge based off of usage (hopefully with a peek/off-peek difference for pricing)

...or option 4, they can reinvest their massive profits into bulking up their infrastructure so they don't have to worry about volume.

Capping volume solves NOTHING.

All it does is get the high-volume users to be more active at the beginning of their billing cycle, which will STILL impact 'the network'. It will just impact it for a shorter period of time. And if billing cycles are staggered, there will always be some

Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

Network Neutrality refers to ISPs double dipping on charging/extorting fees for both users paying for their connections and web sites paying for prioritization of traffic according to origination and destination. It does not refer to protocol-based QoS. It does not mean a flat, unmanaged, unQoS-ed Internet. By repeatedly and deliberately misusing this phrase, its importance is being weakened.

Re:

Also stop misusing "Network Management"! What they are dong is traffic shaping, which I would say is a Network Engineering function, not that of Network Management.

Re:Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

No, what they are doing is Traffic Forgery. They were forging packets to get the connections to stop. Forgery is something we shouldn't tolerate in any form, especially when it is from the ISP who is perfectly placed to do a Man-in-the-middle attack [wikipedia.org] on traffic.

They weren't doing any kind of classic traffic shaping, since that takes much more processing power to do.

A "Network Neutrality" issue -IS- what this is.

Prof. Timothy Wu, the man who DID first coin the term "Network Neutrality" testified at the hearing, and he seemed perfectly satisfied that discriminating against users' BitTorrent uploads is a fine example of a Network Neutrality violation.

In your example

I disagree

I think Comcast will get a slap on the wrist, and throttling will resume. That's how the government has been operating for the past 7 years. Why should I expect them to change now?

Re:I disagree

Please.

Yes, Bush has been a disappointment, but you're kidding yourself if you think his exit will have any measurable effect on policy.

I can think of a few hundred other people (congress and even the people that continue to vote these shills into office) to blame for lack of positive change along with the president, and they're not all related to the administration. In fact, last I looked, the Democrats controlled congress. If they really wanted to, change could have been long since happening.

As long as the money stays in Washington and we have career politicians, things will remain the same.

Juliet Sierra

Thats the FCC will do, Jack ... The majority of their hearings either come up unresolved or contrary to the public good. Business intrests win out more often then Joe citizen under the current administration... Though unlikely to change much even after administrations change... Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.

Reasonable explanation...

"The whole debate an extension of the years-old tussle over whether Net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit network operators from prioritizing traffic as they wish, are necessary to safeguard the Internet's historically open architecture."

Not perfect, but at least the article gets the core idea mostly right. Usually, it gets totally butchered, you know?

Poll

I'm curious what the /. community thinks... what if a company such as Comcast were to offer two plans:

1. $30/mo - The internet as we know it today without any preference to content providers, advertising, etc
   
2. 2) $15/mo - An internet where some content providers get preference, subsidizing the lower monthly bill.
   
3. 
   If companies offered a choice would we still care?
   
   Or are we worried that all providers will go the way of #2 and the price of #1 will inflate as supply dwindles?

notch in a gun?

WTF is a notch in a gun?  Is that a good or a bad thing?

Re:Comcast in hot hot heat

Basically.

Look, Comcast is just being pissy because they dont want to put in new lines. End of story. In my area (as with MANY others) cable companies are bought out all the time. Comcast bought Adelphia, who had bought GE Communications probably 5 years before that. Comcast KNOWS that if it puts the money into upgrading its capacity, it will bankrupt, and some new, fancy cable company will come in, but its newly installed lines for pennies on the dollar, and take over. Problem solved for 5 years.

I don't care for Verizon personally, but they're doing the right stuff with this FiOS. They're laying down fresh fiber to eventually replace their old copper lines. The interwebz aren't getting any smaller, so this is the way all ISPs will have to go sooner or later (without some miracle in wireless tech).

Furthermore, I am paying for an unlimited service. Thats what its called and advertised as, unlimited. Well, fucking with my speeds and sending fake reset packets, well, that seems like a limit to me, doesn't it?

I envy you people that CAN bitch about other sucky ISPs, because Comcast is the only one I'll ever be able to bitch about here.

Re:

Have you checked if Speakeasy DSL [speakeasy.net] is available in your area? Their Terms of Service [speakeasy.net] seem somewhat sane:

If you utilize any of your Speakeasy services in a manner which consumes excessive bandwidth or affects Speakeasy's core equipment, overall network performance, or other users' services, Speakeasy may require that you cease or alter these activities.

So there is the possibility that they will ask you to throttle your own speed during the day or something. Not likely, I know, but another paragraph giv

Re:

6. Comcast, AT&T, verizon continue aggressive bittorrent blocking. Qwest refuses to do that and continues its old policy of allowing all.

Verizon doesn't block BitTorrent, they won't even send you so much a letter for downloading over 1 tb.

Re:

Yet. What Comcast has been doing is cheap, and nasty: they're not traffic throttling, they're traffic poisoning by forging RST packets. I doubt Verizon's staff want to start down that road, but they're in a better fiscal position to do real traffic monitor