Comcast Finally Files Suit Against FCC Over Traffic Shaping 353
Following up on their threat last year to sue the FCC over sanctions imposed, Comcast has finally filed suit, stating that there are no statutes or regulations that support the FCC's authority to stop traffic shaping procedures. "First, let's recap: After months of proceedings, hearings, and investigations, the FCC concluded on August 1, 2008 that Comcast was discriminating against certain P2P applications using deep packet inspection techniques. These methods thwarted the ability of users to share video and other files via BitTorrent. 'Comcast was delaying subscribers' downloads and blocking their uploads,' declared then FCC Chair Kevin Martin. 'It was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or how small the file might be. Even worse, Comcast was hiding that fact by making [affected] users think there was a problem with their Internet connection or the application.'"
Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Informative)
Following up on their threat last year to sue the FCC over sanctions imposed, Comcast has finally filed suit, stating that there are no statutes or regulations that support the FCC's authority to stop traffic shaping procedures.
Traffic shaping is writing rules like "give ssh and http packets priority over ftp-data". This is good and something almost all ISP that care about good customer service already do. What Comcast was doing, aka packet forgery, was a deliberate attempt to disrupt certain types of transfer. NO good ISP does this, by definition.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:4, Funny)
... NO good ISP does this, by definition.
Well mine does, and it is absolutely COMCASTIC! My turtle is now a much faster... turtle.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is not the ISP's place to make these decisions. Period. End of Story.
Further, if they choose to make these decision
Common Carriers (Score:4, Informative)
They don't.
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Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for?
Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
Jesus. At the shop I work at, SCP, IPSec ONLY, for all of our HIPAA-covered data (EM
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Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for? Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
In fairness, the data could be pre-encrypted and login could be with a one-time password. Why you'd do want all that and still have to dick around with FTP's nightmarish unwillingness to be easy firewalled instead of just installing an SFTP server is beyond me, but you could do it if you really, really wanted to for some bizarre reason.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:4, Informative)
Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for?
Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
Jesus. At the shop I work at, SCP, IPSec ONLY, for all of our HIPAA-covered data (EMR, claim and benefits).
Meh.
We use plain FTP for stuff that's legally protected like that, we just make sure that everything on the ftp server is pgp/gpg encrypted.
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Can we say major HIPAA violation?
Yeah seriously; I saw that and felt a facepalm moment. I work at a tiny hospital (25 beds) and still, anything we send off-premises is encrypted in some way, either by sFTP or VPN (usually the latter).
Of course, one problem is the software vendors who don't give a crap about you violating HIPAA and don't try to work with you to stay secure. That's is one nice improvement in the recent HIPAA update, if I have been informed correctly: business associates are extended under the law, so that they have liabili
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Interesting)
>It is not the ISP's place to make these decisions. Period. End of Story.
Actually it is, because it becomes the ISPs problem when my VPN, VOIP, gaming, etc time out because some guy doing bulk transfers is eating into all the bandwidth. Running a network involves priority and shaping. You may not even notice the shaping, because you can handle 150-200ms latencies with FTP, but the services I mentioned above will notice. Frankly, its networking 101.
>They have just made themselves complicit in committing innumerable crimes ranging from spreading virii to transmitting child porn to terroism.
I see youre as much as a lawyer as you are a network admin.
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The answer to that problem is not "shaping" (or in this case, literally blocking and interfering with specific packets which is not shaping at all). The answer is building a better network and boosting the capacity. But as I understand it, the cable ISPs have control over the cable modems and can limit the over-all bandwidth being consumed by any one customer. (Yes, I know there are hacks that users can perform to overcome this, but that's beside the point... and the hacks can be detected and the user di
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Insightful)
With the individual user's max bandwidth limited, there should be no need for this shaping, unless, of course, their network simply can't support what they are selling.
There is no standard-issue ISP or backbone provider in the world that is not oversold. That's how they make money: by estimating the margins they need to maintain. If they oversell too much, their service will suck and customers will flee. If they don't oversell enough, they'll be paying much more per-customer for their capacity than their competitors and won't be able to stay in business.
For example, suppose an ISP's historic utilization is 10% of their total customers' bandwidth if they were all to start downloading at once. If they buy enough bandwidth to support 5%, then downloads will take forever and everyone will hate it. If they go over 10%, though, they're throwing money down the drain. Suppose they paid for the full 100% of capacity. Customers won't faster speeds than if they bought 11%, because in either case they'd have enough to support actual demand.
Oblig. car analogy: roads are built for average flow, not maximum possible demand. Otherwise you'd have an 8-lane freeway direct to your cul-de-sac. If your hometown overbuilds roads, then they've wasted tax money that could've been spent on other stuff (or not collected in the first place (that was hard to type with a straight face)).
So all that is why we have traffic shaping. At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging. Traffic shaping seems like it would be bad, up until you're stuck using a connection that doesn't use it.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and I forgot to address your car analogy... these are my favorites!
When demand exceeds capacity, the roads are usually expanded to meet that capacity or additional roads are built to manage the capacity. What Comcast has been doing is not expanding the capacity of the road, but sending vehicles containing specific types of passengers on a detour that ends at the edge of a cliff violently killing them all.
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Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Insightful)
At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging.
I think that was the point, Comcast was shaping 24/7 when there was no need to. Also, I have no problem with traffic shaping at the protocol level (Voip over http), but I don't find it acceptable to do it on a service level (Comcast phone at home over Vonage).
Traffic shaping is usually generically stated as a possibility in your contract (e.g. we may provide increased bandwidth to certain applications for best user experience). Instead they should spell it out (e.g. We will not oversubscribe our network beyond 10%. During times of network congestion greater than 70% of available bandwidth, we will prioritize in the following manner - Voip, http, unknown, email, ftp). Finally I think the providers should have a network status page so you can see the condition of their network and your link, and it shows you vaguely where the congestion is (your segment, their hub).
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Bandwidth gets cheaper the more you have it. I can tell you that all the business accounts with these same providers have SLA agreements involving bandwidth and uptime which means that can't oversell that much. Then you also have companies like IO Data which don't oversell. They actually buy more bandwidth and more power than required to prevent problems such as these. They make plenty of money too.
The reality is that they aren't expanding capacity. I put on a traveling show so I can speak from a little pe
If they oversell too much, (Score:3, Insightful)
their service will suck and customers will flee.
Not if that's the only choice for broadband. In most places people do not have a choice whom thy get broadband from. They either get it from a monopoly or they don't get broadband.
If they go over 10%, though, they're throwing money down the drain.
You're missing a key word here, specifically an adjective. That adjective being "taxpayer", which modifies "money". Taxpayers gave cable and phone companies $200 Billion [newnetworks.com] in subsidies to build out broadband. But a
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Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, if we both pay for the same service level, should your packets get priority just because your protocol wants less latency? That means that you get the service you paid for and I don't.
No it doesn't. If the network isn't saturated then giving his VoIP application higher QoS priority just means that some of your individual packets will be delayed by a few microseconds, but the total throughput will be almost identical. Furthermore, when the network is saturated, it is completely possible to give one application (like bittorrent) a higher throughput priority while another (like VoIP) a higher latency priority. Then his packets will only have a higher priority than yours if he is using less bandwidth than you are anyway.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:4, Insightful)
If that was all they did, there would be little if any complaining. The problem was that they would just shoot down torrent connections and then denied that they did it.
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why, if we both pay for the same service level, should your packets get priority just because your protocol wants less latency?
Because he's using latency-sensitive protocols and you're not. If you used them, the shaping would make your stuff more responsive, too.
If you want more of the pipe more of the time, then you should pay for the privilege.
Repeat after me: latency != bandwidth. You're both getting full use of the pipe. The only difference is that protocols that humans use are handled more quickly than protocols that computers use. If you send an IM, do you really want its packet queued up behind an emailed Powerpoint presentation of a dog peeing on something? If the email server takes an extra 1/1500th of a second to receive, no one will notice. If the IM client takes an extra 10 seconds to receive, you'll notice the heck out of it.
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The blade cuts both ways.
Imagine you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Suddenly the owner comes out and one by one goes up to random tables and tells them they can only have x more plates before they are cut off.
Aside from the fact that this was advertised as an all-you-can-eat-buffet, the poor looking family starts making a ruckus: We are poor and my family is starving. If food
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it is, because it becomes the ISPs problem when my VPN, VOIP, gaming, etc time out because some guy doing bulk transfers is eating into all the bandwidth. Running a network involves priority and shaping. You may not even notice the shaping, because you can handle 150-200ms latencies with FTP, but the services I mentioned above will notice. Frankly, its networking 101.
Okay, does Networking 101 involve knowing the difference between latency-sensitive and bandwidth-sensitive connections, and appropriately prioritizing them based on their actual usage, not a-priori decisions based on packet type?
E.g. VPN -- it may be latency sensitive and thus deserve priority if you're using the VPN for VNC or similar, or it may be as latency-insensitive and bandwidth-heavy as an ftp transfer, if what you're doing is an ftp transfer over VPN. In which case it causes as many problems for your VOIP users as any other file transfer, and giving it high priority will only make those issues worse.
VOIP on the other hand should always be low bandwidth (I don't know how low, but your land line works perfectly with a single 64kbs T0 virtual circuit), but latency sensitive, so giving it high priority should mean that its packets get through quickly, but don't actually delay anything else for any significant period of time.
Whereas streaming video is hypothetically latency sensitive, but very high bandwidth, so the solution there is not to prioritize the packets, but to have the client buffer up some data first, hopefully making it latency insensitive as long as the bandwidth stays fairly steady.
Basically what I'm proposing here is an idea from Operating Systems 101, where they have to solve a very similar problem. Some apps require responsiveness but don't need much cpu, others require lots of CPU time but don't really care how quickly they get scheduled for it as long as on average they get lots of cpu time. Scheduling the low-CPU apps first gives them the responsiveness they need, but by definition doesn't significantly hinder the cpu-intensive ones. But as soon as the app no longer fits that definition and starts eating up too much CPU, it gets bumped down in priority. That's the basic idea of the multi-level feedback queue. The best part is its dynamic and based on real usage -- you can even tell the OS what kind of app you are to get put into your preferred queue right away, but if that turns out to be a lie, you get shifted to the queue you belong in automagically.
Back when I took Networking 101, they never talked about any 'scheduler' ideas of any sophistication, and the QoS they did discuss was very simple and naive, seemingly from the basis that networking hardware wasn't up to the task. On the other hand they also talked about this kind of deep packet inspection as though it, too, was something that would be possible in the future but not yet.
So... Now that we can do the packet inspection, can we now associate the packets with a connection, and do prioritization based on actual usage, and actual utilization?
Which, by the way, is where the bullshit becomes really apparent wrt Comcast and how they actually do their shaping. They kill bittorrent et. al. at all times of day, regardless of actual network utilization at the time. Grandma Lolcat Lover causes more problems watching short videos during 'net prime time than a 20GB bittorrent at 5am. Comcast doesn't distinguish, because for them it's not about actually managing the network.
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How do you figure that traffic shaping is good when the ISP has no idea what the traffic is used for?
My goal was to use a simple illustrative example. More sophisticated shaping uses token buckets and other structures that can prioritize interactive traffic over bulk traffic.
Case in point: I work for an IT shop that supports many physicians offices. one of the primary methods of moving data between offices and hospitals is through EMR applications that USE FTP. Who is the ISP to tell me that my FTP traffic is less important than Disney's HTTP traffic?
Traffic shaping isn't about importance. It's about responsiveness. Again, the idea is that interactive protocols like SSH, Jabber, etc. send relatively tiny amounts of time-sensitive data. Next up are bulkier protocols like HTTP that are still fairly interactive. Least sensitive are bulk transfers like FTP, P2P, and so on.
Your tra
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Put this in a computer context: would you run Folding@home at the exact same priority as your mouse driver, or do you enjoy having a responsive pointer (while still allowing your heavy background processes to run at full speed)?
This comes down to "it depends on how much bandwidth/CPU power you have".
I was doing completely normal computing the other day with no obvious speed issues, when I realized I was still running 4 instances of Prime 95 to stress-test the machine. Then, I fired up a game and couldn't even notice that anything was running in the background. This was on a Core i7 920 with hyperthreading enabled.
So, Comcast could just increase the bandwidth they have to the rest of the world, and there would be no need for any
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Ignoring the long list of foolishness that is your statement about using FTP to transfer confidential and legally protected patient information, none of that really matters.
In traffic shaping, you're typically not limiting bandwidth but rather latency. Applications which require low latency (games, ssh, video conferencing, VoIP, etc), can be granted priority ensuring their packets are placed in front of bulk transfer protocols. The bandwidth remains the same but the overall user experience is improved. Only
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HTTP traffic, no. VoIP traffic, maybe---not more important, but more time sensitive. QoS is reasonable for limiting latency fo
Re:Not traffic shaping! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that isn't what comcast was caught doing. To use your freeway analogy, it's more like Comcast put up a big sign that said "Trucks use this exit" except instead of an exit, it was a cliff. Whenever they detected P2P traffic, they sent a reset packet to both sides of the connection, severing it completely before any significant amount of data could be sent.
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Except that isn't what comcast was caught doing. To use your freeway analogy, it's more like Comcast put up a big sign that said "Trucks use this exit" except instead of an exit, it was a cliff
Please don't give me any ideas...
Precisely. (Score:5, Insightful)
What Comcast was doing is not, and never has been, "traffic shaping."
What Comcast did was fraud, the equivalent of stealing the mail out of someone's mailbox or a Fedex/UPS employee walking off with your package.
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Saying that big trucks must use the left lane is traffic shaping.
Don't you know that the internet isn't a great big truck but a series of tubes?
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But if you're in an area where Comcast has been given a monopoly on cable service and your phone company can't/won't provide DSL (or FIOS), do they have the right to be a bad ISP?
Well, the FCC doesn't (or at least didn't) seem to think so, hence the fact that this article was written in the first place.
Comcast could be right, except (Score:4, Insightful)
All about: Higher Margins (Score:2)
Comcast is doing this for one reason: so it can continue to vastly oversell it's network. "Unlimited" = "Unlimited because we hope you're all grannies who check their email once in awhile."
Re:Comcast could be right, except (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast could be free to throttle.
This is what a lot of people, and comcast, are not seeing.
No body at all (except comcast) has said they can't throttle!
Comcast wants to be free to do 'thing A', because there are no laws against doing 'thing A'
And they are right. And they CAN do 'thing A' and no one said otherwise.
Problem is, comcast is actually doing 'thing B' which is totally different and unrelated.
The FCC told them they can't do 'thing B' because it is not legal.
Comcast replies "But but but, 'thing A' is legal! we should be able to do it!" as if that was relative to anything at all.
Obviously, 'thing A' is traffic shaping and throttling. 'thing B' is packet forgery and spoofing.
Comcast sucks Cheney's balls (Score:3, Interesting)
The only reason Comcast gets my money is because they were granted a monopoly for Cable in my area. IMHO, we really need to start talking about taking away cable and in some places fiber monopolies.
On another note it would be way cool to be able to have whichever company's box has the broadcast channels on it that you associate with your home town, in my case New York and San Francisco. Do particular broadcast company stations have monopolies as well for geographic areas? I'm pretty damn sick of monopolies, we need to go antitrust hopefully with this administration before its too late.
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As to cable companies
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Re:Comcast sucks Cheney's balls (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, we really need to start talking about taking away cable and in some places fiber monopolies.
The Economist, a pro-free-market newsmagazine, proposed [economist.com] something like that recently:
Unfortunately, I doubt there are very good prospects for this: the business model of the telecom firms depends inherently on rent-seeking enabled by lack of competition.
Re:Comcast sucks Cheney's balls (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note it would be way cool to be able to have whichever company's box has the broadcast channels on it that you associate with your home town, in my case New York and San Francisco. Do particular broadcast company stations have monopolies as well for geographic areas?
I live equidistant to Omaha, NE and Sioux City, IA. The FCC has declared that my city is part of Sioux City's viewing area. No matter what we tried, the FCC would not allow us to get Omaha channels from Dish Network, even though Omaha is much larger than Sioux City, has more interesting news, and is actually in the same state I live in.
So, no. What you're asking for is unthinkable to the FCC, and they will talk to you like a kindergartener with air-spread tapeworms if you have the audacity to ask them to let you do it.
Dear Comcast, (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Comcast:
FUCK YOU.
- a former customer
Regional Monopolies (Score:2)
Regional Monopolies are either utilities subject to intense regulation, or are subject to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Where's your Attorney General now? Seriously....where is he/she??
Makes sense to me (Score:2)
In a perfect world... (Score:5, Interesting)
With luck, the FCC will get pissed and make an example of Comcast. I know it won't happen, but I can hope.
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Actually, the time has come... (Score:5, Insightful)
'Unless you re-write the laws to make cable a "utility" you can't govern the way they provide service.'
Actually, I believe the time has come to re-categorize internet providers as utilities. Most ISPs operate as either a monopoly or duopoly, have municipal districts and are considered to be an essential service for both business and home. All of these are common traits for a utility. It's time to start treating them as such.
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Indeed. Internet service used to be a luxury, just like the telephone was when it first came out. Now, it is as much of a utility as phone service, perhaps even more of a utility since
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It's Comcast's hard earned money, they should be able to expand their monopoly as far as they can without government interference.
You are absolutely correct, except for the fact that Comcast HAS a monopoly because of government interference.
The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
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The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
Interesting bias, but utterly wrong in this case. The answer to severe problems created by dopey regional and local government "regulations" (I would term them franchise agreements, absent of any regulation and loaded with exclusivity) has always been Federal oversight and, if that fails, Federal regulation.
Has been that way since the Civil War.
Also, see this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause [wikipedia.org]
Federal "regulation" is a Constitutionally mandated solution to this sort of nonsense.
--
Toro
Re:what are you a democrat? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsensical.
The solution to bad government regulation is effective government regulation. Countries all over the world have effectively run networks that are under the control of the people through democratic action, not subject to the skew of the profit desires of some private entity.
There are some things that cannot operate in a totally free market, like banking, health care, and utilities. The reason is because modern societies require these things to operate, and they should not be left to the wild swings and herd mentality of the market. Nor should my ability to get health care be affected by someone else's incentive to deny me health care. Nor should a banker be allowed to repackage bad debt as good debt through collusion with another company and sell it to me. Nor should a private company be my only option for local utilities service.
Let me put it like this: if there's a free, unregulated market for MP3 players, that's fine. Duke it out. Screw your customers. Worst case scenario, they have a broken MP3 player and they don't have the money anymore.
If there's a free unregulated healthcare market, don't be surprised if you end up with corporations who don't care if children die of leukemia [msn.com] if they can get out of providing care on a technicality. They have no obligation to do the right thing, and their shareholders only know of a single value: profit. Worse case scenario: you are dead, or at least bankrupt for the rest of your life.
Internet access probably falls somewhere in the middle.
Go FCC (Score:2)
Go FCC, snuff out Comcast.
Comcast's Case Must Not Be So Great (Score:2)
Bad Plan (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider that the only thing keeping hordes of State regulators from insisting on much stricter requirements (and even open access to that "last mile") is Federal preemption. If the FCC doesn't have the authority to do it, the States do.
Biting the hand that shields you. Smooth move, Comcast!
Perhaps the FCC is the wrong government entity (Score:2)
The FCC doesn't regulate the internet... not yet anyway. However, the problem described does seem to illustrate some very deceptive business practices on Comcast's part. So perhaps the FTC or the Justice Department are more appropriate government entities to address the problem.
The proper response to this news (Score:3, Insightful)
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That would be true if there were genuine competition, but there isn't.
!packet shaping (Score:5, Informative)
"Best Effort" (Score:2)
I feel as though many home broadband connections and business connections are really at the mercy of these shenanigans because there are no SLAs or anything like that, everything is "best effort" delivery. The ISP is promising to try to bring you network connectivity, but they are not promising much beyond that.
I've also been a little afraid of where net neutrality could go. I agree with it 100% in principal, but if congress says that the ISPs cannot essentially shape or prioritize traffic without the app
A fair way to handle traffic shaping (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that if the ISP has the right to shape traffic/ force resets etc, the customer should have the right to shape payments.
If I sign up for 'up to' 10 Mb broadband, I should be paying 'up to' £Amount per month with the actual amount paid decided by me based on my own criteria, just like the amount of bytes i get is decided by the ISP based on their criteria.
Let the ISP ring MY 'customer support' (during hours I decide to provide it) to cry about how I have shaped their monetary stream down by 90% from what they signed up for.
Re:Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is always the other party's fault, no matter what the problem is, when it started, or who started it.
If only each person who said "that other party is to blame" would instead say "the two-party duopoly is to blame" we might actually have real reform.
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No, the duopoly IS at fault, here. Our founding fathers specifically warned AGAINST letting the democratic system devolve into a two-party system.
Once it came down to Republicans and Democrats as the majority parties, America started going to shit. It's always white or black, no shades of grey.
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Why was that modded down? I don't see how either party is involved, except that Bush appointed the FCC Chairman who shot down Comcast. If anything, wouldn't that be one of the (possibly few) good that he did?
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Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he was trying to pander to the left-leaning partisan audience with mod points.
If he's a karma whore he's not very good at it; there are a LOT of Republicans here. I think what he was trying to point out was that the last administration was one that viewed the government as "always the problem", and face it, the Republicans deregulated, deregulated, and deregulated some more. Of course there were exceptions, but on the whole they're mostly for deregulation.
Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you need effective regulators. No more kickbacks [ohmygov.com], incompetence [risknews.net], and laziness [washingtonpost.com].
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Just to be clear, your first paragraph is talking about Federal Government, while the 2nd paragraph's discussion of monopolies should be talking about Local Government. Though frequently the monopoly is handed out by non-governmental organizations like the developer who is building the community.
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Take the current credit crunch; a lot of the problems were caused by a short term bonus environment which encouraged excessive risk taking. I'm a lot more interested in hearing a UK party actually come u
Insightful? Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure. It's the same reason that you don't find duplicate toll roads paralleling each other. This type of system naturally gravitates to a monopoly - whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices, after which "hello monopoly pricing!"
Partisan politics doesn't enter into it until you get one group of people who have as their religion "free market always bad" facing off against another group whose religion is "free market always good". The truth of the matter is that it varies from business to business, product to product. Adjust policy accordingly - if the system has high barriers to entry or increasing returns to scale, regulate it to level the playing field and/or protect consumers. If it has low barriers to entry and decreasing returns to scale, let competitors duke it out in the free market.
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't you take of your partisan blinders and look at how the free market treats consumers.
The last 3 places I have lived at had only 1 cable company "choice".
Why do you think that is?
Because the government has encouraged there to be only one cable company in most areas. I don't know what the current laws are, but I remember when cable was being rolled out. Different cable companies would apply for the franchise to operate in a particular area (if it was an area that was lucrative enough that more than one was interested), then the local government would grant a monopoly to one of them. I remember some major scandals when it was discovered that some local officials were accepting what amounted to bribes to grant the local franchise to one company or another.
So, to reiterate, the answer to your question as to why in most areas there is no competition among cable providers is that the government set it up that way.
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
Comcast forges RST packets and intercept DNS requests using man in the middle attacks. This not only disrupts legitemate use of peer to peer technology but corporate VPN access for people working from home. If you or I were to do the same thing, we could be arrested and charged as felons under the DMCA and other "hacking" laws. Comcast is a criminal organization, its time for them to be held to account for the federal felonies that they are committing. Unfortunately, the limited liability of the America corporate system ensures that these felons will never serve jail time even in the unlikely event that something is done to stop their crimes.
Re:Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, Comcast does allow you to opt out of the DNS redirection and they processed my request for this quite quickly.
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
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You mean like the strong regulative powers that handed Comcast the data provider monopoly it enjoys in many places?
I have a philosophy ... (Score:5, Informative)
Lack of government regulation can be bad. Some government regulation is good. Massive amounts of government regulation is bad.
who here disagrees?
Read Common Sense - not so common anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution [ushistory.org]
Although the prose is a bit dated, this is some remarkably "back to basics" thinking that could do some people a lot of good. I quote:
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer
Re:Read Common Sense - not so common anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with any sort of Libertarian position is that, from everything we can tell, no human society has ever functioned like that. We can talk about theoretical governments (like Plato did, he pretty much being the guy that gave us the first concise definitions of major governing models), but I think it's important to look at the reality of the human condition.
We need governments. More to the point, if we didn't have them, we would create them. We're social animals, are basic instinct is organize into dominance hierarchies. What the Enlightenment thinkers who troubled themselves with politics tried to reason out was a balance between the human nature to form governments and the philosophical notion that people deserve and need a certain amount of liberty to achieve their aspirations as individuals and as groups.
Saying "governments are evil" is as about as sensible a position as declaring "art is evil". To be sure, both can be used to evil ends (and for those of us just coming out of the 20th century, we have an era when every possible evil any government could commit seems to have been committed by some government). At the same time, governments can produce beneficial things, as the ultimate agent of our species' need to work collectively.
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We need governments. More to the point, if we didn't have them, we would create them.
That is entirely the point of Common Sense (though I can see how my out of context quote can and most certainly be misconstrued). I should have posted the following, in addition:
In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any countr
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I think it rather depends on what the regulations are supposed to do. If it's to create a level playing field, which I think network neutrality legislation would do, then that's a good thing. It means players, regardless of size or of who they ultimately pay to get on the Internet have a certain baseline performance.
The trouble is that the big Telcos have managed to intentionally confuse two related but quite separate issues; QoS and neutrality. No reasonable party is saying that there shouldn't be some
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It's a little more complex than that [slashdot.org].
Re:Republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention, the writing on the wall is, if they want the right to be non-regulated despite deep inspection on the data they carry, they clearly are responsible for the data which they carry. Seems they are begging to fall under telephone regulations; which they absolutely don't want. Either they are a transparent pipe or they are going to be held responsible for inspecting, routing, prioritization, and monitoring all traffic they carry. Seems they want to have their cake, eat it, and all the while rape your mother with no price to pay. Hopefully Congress will grant the power to the FCC to remind ISPs the privileges they've already been granted.
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Re:Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard that theory put forth by libertarians many times, and it is as wrong now as it has been every other time. There are two very fundamental problems with that theory:
That last one bears explaining. A few years ago, I watched a new cable company try to set up shop in a small university town of about 10,000 people. Here's what happened.
The original cable company is an entrenched business. Regardless of monopoly status, it has been around for years and owns all its own lines. It has no debts because the lines are paid off already. Therefore, its only costs are buying the service from upstream, line maintenance (minimal), handing payments (most of which is done by mail sent to/from a regional office somewhere), and sending people out to connect/disconnect customers and swap out cable boxes. In short, it is largely a cash cow, and has huge profit margins built in.
The new company has to put in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cable, equipment, etc. It now has a huge debt. It also has to compete with the existing cable company. It must either do so by providing more channels or undercutting them on price. Unfortunately, because of the construction debt, it must make a certain amount of profit just to stay in business.
The result is that the new company undercuts the entrenched company and makes them angry. The entrenched company undercuts them far enough that they cannot compete and still pay off their construction debt. In spite of taking over a third of the entrenched company's business, after five years, the new company is still hemorrhaging money. Thus, it gives up, declares bankruptcy if needed, and sells all of the new equipment to the entrenched cable company. The entrenched cable company then raises rates to make up the money it lost while competing with the now defunct new company, all the while enjoying the lower maintenance costs of the new equipment that it bought for pennies on the dollar.
And this, my friends, is what inevitably occurs when a business with such huge startup costs tries to compete in a fixed-size market. There is truly no way to prevent this except to take the startup costs out of the picture, either by the government giving a colossal grant to the cable company to cover its infrastructure costs or by the government building the infrastructure to begin with and leasing it out to multiple competitors.
The only way telecom competition can work is if the infrastructure provider and the data provider are not the same company---if the infrastructure provider leases access to the data provider on a nondiscriminatory basis. The government is an ideal builder of infrastructure because it can afford to build it and run it at cost instead of making a profit. Therefore, the ideal form of telecom competition is one in which the government rolls out the fiber and leases fiber access to half a dozen telcos. Everywhere that has done this has seen incredible competition in the telecom space. Most communities that have not done this have little to no competition even if they are completely willing to allow multiple telcos or cable companies to do business in the area. At best, they have partial competition in which the government forces the incumbent telcos to lease access to the lines (e.g. DSL competition).
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"When I use a P2P client to download a torrent, invariably it reaches a point where my internet connection slows to a crawl, then stops. Then nothing connects, neither my browser, email or P2P client. I have to toggle the power on the cable modem, and after it reboots and reconnects, everything is peachy for a few hours"
Blame the router: that's typical symptom on P2P over cheap routers of congestion problems with the connection-tracking table,.
One little problem with that (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be viable, except that Comcast has never had common-carrier status.
Qualification vs. Status (Score:2)
They may well qualify -- but in the USA, common-carrier status (at least for telecommunications) isn't automatic. The company has to apply and be granted CC status (which is not without liabilities). Comcast never has.
And, no, IANAL and can't give you a source.
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*sigh*, the persistence of belief in this dated misinformation is more than annoying.
Please see http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36623 [slyck.com]