FCC Asks Comcast About Internet Filter

FCC Asks Comcast About Internet Filter

biz.yahoo.com

Comcast Corp. Monday said it has received a letter of inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission regarding complaints that the company actively interferes with its subscribers' Internet traffic.
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against the sharing of certain types of Internet data among subscribers.

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Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter
Dancing Spychief Wants to Tap Into Cyberspace

More censorship news!

It seems Big Brother really does want to track your spending, researching, IM chats, and everything you download.

1984 came sooner than we thought it would.




biz.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by biggie smalls


Comcast responds:

"We look forward to responding to the FCC inquiries regarding our broadband network management," said David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, in a statement.

"We believe our practices are in accordance with the FCC's policy statement on the Internet where the Commission clearly recognized that reasonable network management is necessary for the good of all customers," he added.

They're so full of # its not even funny.

"We'll comply now because we got caught, but before that we were acting illegally. Woops."

I find this interesting as I use torrent files. These are some of the targeted file types. I have Time-Warner and I suspect them of doing some things as Comcast does.

I hope the industry does get put in it's place by the FCC.

All i can say is i'm glad i dumped commie cast last month.

Seams that i would pay my bill in full, then in 2 months have it be 510 bucks.

Granted i will admit i was late paying it, but my monthly bill was 130.00. that sure the heck doesn't add up to over 510 bucks in 2 months.

Went with WOW but they might be doing the same things.

I was just about to post this! I was mistaken in my understanding of cable Internet providers not being able to do this... unless Comcast was just doing it anyway. (Comcast is cable, right?)

It appears the real difference between cable-based Internet and phone-based Internet like AT&T is cable-based are classified as an Information Service and phone-based are Telecommunications. Both are subject to different FCC regulations and reporting. Telecommunications being much more strict and open to regulatory action.

And Vuze Inc., a company that distributes video using BitTorrent file-sharing technology, later filed a separate complaint, asking the FCC to clarify how much power Internet service providers have in controlling traffic on their lines.

I anxiously await their clarification.

What the complaint is about is their use of traffic filters like the Ellacoya traffic management system to throttle certain types of traffic during peak hours.
Here in the UK it's a system that is widely used for our broadband systems & is no secret. We have a model in the UK called capacity based charging, this means that we aren't charged for the speed of the service but the capacity we use. We also have a a high contention ratio per DSLAM which means we have upto 50 people sharing a central pipe.
Therefor this system has been widely implimented to allow the throttling of p2p traffic during peak hours so as not to affect the general speed of the internet for all other users.
P2P downloaders account for 80% of the traffic in the UK & i'm sure they account for almost the same in the U.S.
Oh & a tip to finish with. If you are on a service that uses traffic management & use bittorrent then if you enable protocol encyption, the traffic management can't decypher the packets & your download speeds should increase.

[edit on 15-1-2008 by mclarenmp4]