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

[chevman]

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 progress is good, no?

Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

[bconway]

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.

I disagree

[CSMatt]

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?

Juliet Sierra

[Taelron]

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.

Re:The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

[calebt3]

No. They prefer us to be in the pre-Youtube era of data usage.

What Will Come Of The FCC Comcast Hearing?

[IHC Navistar]

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

.....in our favor, at least.

Re:Comcast sucks

[steelfood]

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.

What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing

[jltnol]

Nothing. Both money and time will be wasted on the hearings, but no changes will occur. Network shaping will persist, because the ISP's don't want to spend the money to upgrade their infrastructure.... unless they can get the government to pay for it, and then charge the end users more money for it.

Re:Stop misusing "Network Neutrality"

[corsec67]

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.

[funchords]

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, the incentive is MONEY gained by charging content providers extra fees for carriage and then giving their traffic preferential treatment.

However, in the Comcast example, the incentive is MONEY saved by eliminating BitTorrent traffic and then putting off the new plant installations installations and additional transit fees that would normally have been paid to handle user demand.

So what's the real difference?

And nobody wants an unmanaged un-Qos'ed internet. But most people think that how the Internet works is the job of the IETF and the Internet Standards ... who already have defined ways for applications to identify time-critical, jitter-sensitive packets and have defined what carriers should do about them.

Otherwise, how do you write software for an world-wide internet when half-a-dozen ISPs and transit providers on any given path want to "tune" the higher-level protocols to their own secret views on how the Internet ought to be prioritized?

Capping volume solves NOTHING.

[rickb928]

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 BitTorrent users sucking up gobs of bandwidth, causing trouble, you know their drill.

Volume caps are a lie. The sad truth is that Comcast is acting as if they can't actually deliver what they say they can - all the Internet you can ask for. The truth is that no network has an infinite capacity, not even the South Korean and Japanese 'wonders'. It's just that Comcastand others have not kept up with demand.

Imagine if the cable companies had to carry full-bandwidth HDTVfor every channel, and I mean 1080p, not the MP4 dreck they foist on us now. This would cut their channel capacity by 50-75%. And no one would tolerate it. Same price for a quarter the content? And just because theh didn't have big enough pipes? We would correctly tell them to make the pipes, and then they can charge us.

As it is, throttling Internet bandwidth isn't even giving those who would the chance to pay even more.

Comcast is so out on a limb here.

Don't think FIOS is some kind of savior

[ashpool7]

They're ripping out the copper (regulated) to put in (unregulated) fiber, so they can build a network like the cable company and do whatever the hell they feel like, not unlike Comcast.