New Legislation Could Eventually Lead to ISP Throttling Ban

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast's response to the FCC may have triggered a new avenue of discussion on the subject of Net Neutrality. Rep. Ed Markey (D — Mass.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, introduced a bill yesterday whose end result could be the penalization of bandwidth throttling to paying customers. 'The bill, tentatively entitled the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, would not actually declare throttling illegal specifically. Instead, it would call upon the Federal Communications Commission to hold a hearing to determine whether or not throttling is a bad thing, and whether it has the right to take action to stop it.'"

What about the other end?

[suso]

I wonder if this will have any effect on web/application hosting providers who are using traffic shaping to allocate only a certain amount of bandwidth (such as 3Mbit even though they advertise having larger backbones). Or could it be applied to modules like mod_bandwidth where hosting providers cut off your web hosting if you exceed a certain amount?

net neutrality

[yincrash]

looks like some senators might actually be listening to their constituents

Re:net neutrality

[yincrash]

also, isn't this a dangerous game that comcast is playing? if you're saying you're taking responsibility for throttling based on content, are you responsible if you know specifically illegal content is flowing through your pipes?

Colleges as ISPs?

[_bug_]

So given the broad definition of ISP that's been used in other areas of law it would seem colleges and universities would fall under this throttling ban as well.

That's going to really suck.

File sharing eats a very large majority of bandwidth for many colleges and without some form of throttling access to resources for other purposes (e.g. college business, student research, and incoming traffic to college resources like websites and distributed computing services) would be seriously hindered.

If Comcast is having similar issues then I can see why they do throttling and would support them. If you don't like it switch providers. That'll hurt Comcast where it really counts for them: their wallets.

Re:Depend on how much you pay

[badfish99]

Why wouldn't you name the company? Are you afraid they will sue you for telling us that they have an AUP? Or do you think that it would be good for us to have to google to find out which company changed hands recently and charges £40?

The market didn't create my cable monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

My local government created the comcast monopoly. They allow them to tax us through a "municipal cable fee" and my government gets 24 hours a day of commercials with no dissenting viewpoints that tell us how well the incumbents are doing.

Market forces didn't create this monopoly, government did.

Re:What about the other end?

[Just Some Guy]

Whatever happened to "quality of service"? I see no ethical problems with detecting torrents and running them at a lower priority, for example, so that they're still perfectly usable but don't overwhelm more interactive activities like web browsing. Everyone seems to be so into imposing quotas when there seem to be more customer-friendly and provider-friendly solutions.

Re:What about the other end?

[budgenator]

you forgot the "if your lucky enough to find an unused port" part.

Re:The end reult will be...

[budgenator]

With the huge increase in bandwidth usage, bandwidth cost is now the largest factor in providing ISP service
It doesn't really work that way, the cost of provide a given amount of bandwidth is fixed for the most part. Comcast is an exception, I think they purchase bandwidth from a backbone provider so the may occasionally be some peaking charges for them for going over, but for the most part if they buy 1TBs of backbone bandwidth they pay whether we use it or not. Frequently these guy engage in peering agreements amongst themselves which can be thought of as a shortcut around the backbone, where they argree to carry the others packets in return for the same. This was how things were done in the old pre-internet days with UUPC, my company might have a "leased line" between my organizations in Detroit and Memphis, yours might have a line between Memphis and St. Louis; so for me to send an Email to somebody in St. Louis I'd send it from the computer in Detroit to Memphis which would dial-up yours in Memphis and local rates rather than long-distance and then forward it to St. Louis, and the Email needed to have the complete route in the address! Tier 1 providers don't pay at all, they can route to the whole world through their own network or through peering.