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Comments: 191 + - Your Rights Online: New Legislation Could Eventually Lead to ISP Throttling Ban on Thursday February 14 2008, @11:33AM
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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.'"
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Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop 425 comments
Submission: New legislation could lead to ISP throttling ban by Anonymous Coward
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What about the other end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about the other end? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely they'll say "LOL sounds like a FTC issue to us, I don't think we have the right to do anything, take your complaint to..." and then give you directions to the wrong place in true bureaucratic style.
Parent
Re:What about the other end? (Score:5, Informative)
Any limit imposed should be clearly defined, and i would gladly pay extra for a true unlimited connection. It should also be mandatory to declare any contention up front too, like "you have an 8mb link to a 800mb backbone, which has up to 200 users so you're connection could drop to 4mb during busy periods". Customers should know exactly what service they're paying for.
Parent
Re:What about the other end? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I find it shameful that a new law has to be passed that essentially says "you know those silly old truth in advertising laws? Well just this once, we've decided to actually enforce them once in a while".
Perhaps I'm just old school or something, but at one time, any network connection would have a committed rate, burstable (or not) and an SLA. What "broadband" provides these days is 0 bps committed rate burstable to 1-6 Mbps and practically no uptime guarantee. What they *advertise* is clearly meant to make the customer believe it's 6Mbps committed with 0 downtime.
This business of metering transfer rather than rate is for the most part a scam to make the customer think they're getting a lot more than they actually are. 1 Gigabyte of transfer sounds like a lot to people but actually translates to a rate of 3 Kbps (Yes, not even 9600 baud) and skips over discussing factors such as uplinks oversold by a factor of well more than 100 and the various dirty tricks to keep you from actually using the bandwidth you're paying for.
The ugly part is that because there has been practically no enforcement of truth in advertising, even companies that may WANT to be truthful are forced to either lie or get out of the market. If you advertise LIMITED service, even if the limits are actually higher than the secret limits of the competing "unlimited" service (and no dirty tricks to keep the customer from actually reach the limits) you will go out of business.
When ISPs say that net neutrality will bring the network down, what they really mean is that they will be forced to actually admit that they've oversold their uplink, the poor performance really IS their network, not some anonymous "out on the net" problem and they won't be able to double dip by charging two parties full price for carrying the very same packet.
Meanwhile, all of this sweeping under the rug has prevented market forces from applying downward pressure on the price of real committed bandwidth and forcing a more appropriate balance of price vs. SLA which is why we're supplying 0 SLA home broadband with expensive five nines uplinks rather than several dirt cheap three nines uplinks in spite of TCP/IP being designed to support it.
The big incumbants do NOT want the market to go that way because it would lower barriers to entry and force them to work harder for their revenue.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you bothered to read his post instead of spewing inane invective, you'd see that by advertising the contention rate, you'd have enough information to be able to subscribe to an ISP where you don't have to put up with "bandwidth hogs".
Funny, though, if you're not using the bandwidth, then I don't see where it hurts for someone else to be using the bandwidth, and frankly neither does the ISP, since that's how they justify over-subscription in the first place.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait...the post you're responding to doesn't really make a point that's relevant to TFA. TFA is about ISPs throttling bandwidth to customers, not servers throttling bandwidth to a particular endpoint. These are totally different things.
If I'm hosting a server and I throttle the number of requests I'll respond to from a particular IP, (IP range, etc), that's just part of how my app is working. If the end user is paying me for a particular service then these kinds of terms are determined by that agreement
Re:What about the other end? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, as the operator of a hosting provider, and as a consumer, I see both sides of the argument. As a customer, I enjoy the opportunity to use VoD, VoIP, etc... but as a provider, I understand the occasional need to apply certain limitations in order to protect the customer and the network.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
net neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:net neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wasn't aware that Comcast was a telco.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Acronyms (Score:4, Funny)
IANABDCWLOPLIW?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly. Draw up a bill with a fancy new name (suggesting to me there's something irrelevant that we don't want passed stuck in there as well) that will only accomplish forcing the
Nah (Score:2)
The end reult will be... (Score:2)
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Either way, I'd much rather have the option to pay for it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 agree
Which is worse? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I think the solution here is for each community to own and run the lines, then let companies lease access to them.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Comcast will just move to a tiered plan. Expect chronic users to pay 100-200 dollars and month and people metering their usage to they dont hit the limit. Casual downloaders will pay the current price.
2. Any shaping will lead to potential lawsuits. Suddenly your VOIP wont work as well because bitorrent has the same priority as VoIP. Whoops!
3. Lots of lawsuits. Did your webhost or email provider "shape" your packets in any way?
4. QoS dies because everyone legal department decides its too much of a risk to continue to use.
Parent
Re:Which is worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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As a Comcast customer, the first thing I think will happen if the Government passes this is that Comcast will turn around and say that they need to raise my rates to expand their network to the capacity they need to support everyone running peer-to-peer apps
Yeah, cuz they are really hurting [marketwatch.com] right now and clearly have no cash available for network upgrades.
Re:Which is worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Hmm... (Score:2)
So they're asking a government agency whether or not it has authority over something (how said authority will be used is a separate matter, of course). Gee, I wonder what the
This is wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This is wrong. - mod parent up (Score:2)
The answer for every little squabble is NOT to introduce new legislation. If Comcast continues to punish customers, it is the opportunity for other ISPs to step in. Let the free market punish them back.
Unless it is a case of a monopoly that has spun out of control, the free market is a better solution than government intervention.
You said it. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, it is a monopoly which has spun out of control. Or rather, an oligopoly.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Unless I go dialup, I've got exactly three. Fortunately, one of them claims to believe in net neutrality, and they're the one offering fiber, but that's extremely unusual. Unless you're prepared to move to where I live (a small town in Iowa), chances are, your only real option to "let the market decide" or to "vote with your dollars" is to decide that you don't really need this Internet thing anyway.
Parent
Re:This is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead the telecoms said thank you and blocked competitors. Remember the amount of ISP's you could chose from back in the 90's compared to today? My point exactly.
You have 2 ISP's. DSL or cable and both throttle your traffic.
So what are you supposed to do?
Parent
Re:This is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some problems the Government actually is capable of solving better then the market. The market in this case dictates that throttling is good for the bottom line, and ending net neutrality is even better for the bottom line.
Parent
Re:This is wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was competition in the marketplace, I'd agree with you. But alas, I don't even have the option between DSL and cable, let alone FTTH. I get a choice between Charter Communications cable and dial-up (most likely long-distance), which isn't exactly a competing service.
Granted I live in a pretty small town, but that doesn't change the fact that my options are cable and no connectivity. I don't even get enough cell signal at home to have EDGE be my only source of web access, as painful as that option would be were it an option.
Parent
Depend on how much you pay (Score:3, Informative)
We have had the same ISP for years and never had any trouble, we pay for the fastest broadband available which is £40 per month. It changed hands (I will not repeat the name) and now we are throttled, but it is called an AUP. We do not download that much and many "name not mentioned" ISP customers have had exactly the same problem!
They even got found out!
My point is, they are making a public show when they are (or will) do it anyway... just with a nicer name than "throttling", Acceptable Use Policy is much nicer sounding, it really fools us Brits!
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FCC ? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, giving the FCC more discretionary authority is not a good thing to do. They are very receptive to lobbying (broadcast flag, mandatory DRM ...) and industry corruption (employees that leave directly to cushy jobs in the industry they were supposedly regulating just recently). Secondly, I'm not sure where the Federal interest is in regulating businesses -- that the internet as a whole is international?
This is really a contract issue. If their TOS promise "unlimited bandwidth" then they should provide that. If the TOS say "we connect you to the internet" they should not be able to block random ports. And sending fake packets is already a computer crime (at least, if I sent fake packets to Comcast servers I would probably be charged with attempted DOS or something). So I would support a "contact terms mean what they mean" law -- not giving the FCC more discretion to help the industry to screw the customers.
Re:FCC ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you just say that it has to be in the contract, then Comcast will change the contract in the next billing cycle. Because they have a monopoly/duopoly, the market cannot correct it.
If the FCC does the wrong thing, Congress can overrule them. But if you leave it to Comcast to change its contract, that's exactly what it will do, and we will be screwed.
Parent
not sure where the Federal interest is (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think it's pretty well established that when you're dealing with abusive monopolies, contracts mean "bend over, spread cheeks" for the average consumer. I don't think you want that made into a law.
c.
Related Stories (Score:2)
Colleges as ISPs? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 h
Video on Demand competition (Score:3, Insightful)
We need a new law for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever law covers that situation with my quart of milk not being a whole quart, can also quite well handle the situation where I buy 1.5Mb/second bandwidth, and then the second doesn't actually contain all 1.5Mbits, because the company doesn't actually have the infrastructure it's selling access to. ISPs already throttle, that's why they have different speed tiers for us to buy, same as milk is offered by the pint, quart, half-gallon, or gallon.
What we're really talking about here, is that the ISPs are lying about how much milk is in the jug. If our 1.5Mb pipes have to drop to 384K when everyone downloads at the same time, then we have 384K pipes, and they should be labeled and priced as such. Throttling based on content is just a way to legitimize weights-and-measures fraud.