FCC to fine Comcast for blocking P2P
 

FCC chief says Comcast violated Internet rules

WASHINGTON - The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation's largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080711/...net_regulation

Very nice. I believe that Cox does the same thing.

Indeed great news.

It's a complicated issue, many things need to be considered... but it seems good chunk of p2p traffic is people sharing porn stuff, it's got to be hurting our sales, it's not that obvious that comcast getting fined is actually great news?

I dunno woj. I think it could be looked at in too many ways to be sure.

If paying members are being inadvertently throttled, causing them to blame sites instead of ISP and cancel, then it's another way to view it.

Part of this that would absolutely piss me off as a customer of Comcast (if I was one) is that they didnt notify any customers whether it affected them or how much.

I think it's going to affect us all anyway, because one obvious solution for those companies is to offer various rate plans like cell phones. Limited and unlimited etc. If they disclose up front, they can limit and throttle all they want.

Exactly!

The reason comcast blocked it was in answer to OUR(and the music/TV biz) complaints that ISP's weren't doing enough to stop copyright violators who give our products away for free.

So they did what we asked and now we are glad they got fined???????

Not.

Besides, ISP's provide client accounts to these people, not server accounts.

Client accounts pay for unlimited download; not a single company I ever heard of
offers unlimited upload. P2P is unlimited upload and should require a SERVER account.
Like you pay for!

Bottom line, giving "gabligabytes" of free bandwidth to thieves is not a good buisness model.

While it has it bad sides, I still think this is good news. How many sales you think you would lose if ISPs are allowed to start blocking traffic they don't like. How long b4 the moral police pressure them to block porn traffic and websites?

To keep the net open for all, we have to take the good with the bad. P2P will eventually be taken down by copyright laws but we don't need any sort of ISP filtering. That will be bad new for our industry.

Yea, but one is a completely valid problem now, I don't think anyone will question the fact that piracy is hurting sales?

the other is a "slippery slope" problem in the future, it's a bit of a stretch to go from throttling unprofitable users engaged in illegal activity, to blocking porn because some moral police pressured them to do so...

You pay for access to the internet. P2P networks for good or bad are here to stay and one of the major reasons the internet is as popular as it is today.

That's really nice!