Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough

Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica: "Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."

Now....

[yamiyasha]

only if the FCC can deal on that Merger between Sirius and XM

Bad analogy.

[calebt3]

It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.

Another bad analogy

[GaryOlson]

Education is fairer when you hold the smartest and best back just a little bit when the rest of the class can not understand their input.

Re:You'd do the same

[JStegmaier]

Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.

ISPs either need to take on less customers (I know at least one DSL provider in my area is taking this path, actually refusing new customers and their money because they've oversold) or actually tell their customers how much bandwidth they're getting.

Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.

They even flat out lie

[Sangui5]

They admit to sending RST packets, but then claim that they don't forge packets. They're audacious enough to say that the people who say that the packets are forged are the liars. They also say RST packets are the only way, completely ignoring options like ICMP source quench, leaky bucket/token bucket filtering, or TCP's own congestion control reaction to dropped/delayed packets.

Whoever wrote Comcast's response has quite a pair.

Re:It's paid for.

[Sangui5]

Not only that, but their own arguments support the view that they're massively oversold.

They say that they are only targeting a few users--that a "small minority" of people are hogging the bandwidth. If a small percentage (say, 2%) of your users can overload the network, that directly means you are heavily oversold (by 50x).

Why concentrate on "throttling"?

[Sparr0]

I don't think the EFFECT of Comcast's interference is the main issue here. Traffic shaping IS an issue, but not the important one in this case. HOW they are doing it is important. They are forging network packets (RST packets, in particular). This isn't just limiting the cars getting on the highway, it's like calling you on your cell phone before you get on the highway, pretending to be your boss, and telling you not to bother coming to work today. They are committing fraud, of multiple sorts, every time they do this.

Re:Bad analogy.

[dwpayne]

I think a better analogy is if the post office had a policy of deliberately throwing away mail when they were too busy, like at Christmas time or whenever. That's not really interfering, right? Just delaying your mail, I mean, if you don't reply, the other people know to just resend you the same mail again, it just takes a few weeks.

The post office is a good example of net neutrality too. When I write to a congresscritter, I just have to put a stamp on it, I don't have to pay every person who carries the letter. I don't pay my local carrier, then the guy who brings it to the regional center, the long haul trucker who brings it to DC, and so forth, just the one stamp.

Re:Bad analogy.

[ookabooka]

It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.

My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?

Re:Slashtecnica

[KingMotley]

I'd rather see it continue. I don't go to Ars. I don't want to. I also do go to reuters. Or cnews. Or many other news sites. I expect slashdot to bring the most important news here, and that's why I come here. It's not like slashdot has original articles I can't find elsewhere. Every article on slashdot comes from somewhere else.

Re:You are a Moon Master!

[erlehmann]

But the post office charges different rates for different types of mail [...]

certainly not based on what's in the packages (read: packets).

Re:Bad analogy.

[Grandiloquence]

I think a better analogy is if the post office had a policy of deliberately throwing away mail when they were too busy, like at Christmas time or whenever. That's not really interfering, right? Just delaying your mail, I mean, if you don't reply, the other people know to just resend you the same mail again, it just takes a few weeks.

More like, the Post Office throws away your letter, then forges a letter to both parties. Each forged letter has a message equivalent to "I hate you and never want to hear from you again. Stop sending me letters.".