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The $1.77 trillion FCC fine for Comcast - Official inquiry begins
Last week, news broke that Comcast may be paying a steep FCC fine to the tune of $1.77 trillion dollars for throttling peer-to-peer traffic such as BitTorrent. Yesterday, Comcast confirmed that it has received official word that it is under the investigation of the FCC, but an FCC spokesman would not confirm the letter, saying that "Enforcement Bureau communications of this type were not to be made public," according to Multichannel News.If you had hopes that Comcast is going to be held responsible for even a fraction of that $1.77 trillion, think again. Although it made some ripples in the blogosphere, Comcast will most likely wiggle out of this one just fine. Apparently, FCC policies aren't exactly formal "rules" and as such are flexible when it comes to "network management."
So what does Comcast say? Naturally, that they are in accordance with FCC policies since "reasonable network management is necessary for the good of all customers." In other words, it's fine if we throttle your BitTorrent connection since it's for the good of all. Wonderful. They are probably going to resolve this all over a cup of coffee anyway. "Oh that neutrality thing? Yea, you know, peak times, things get busy, networks need to be managed - always have to keep in mind the common good, right?"
[via paidContent.org]
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsshanoboyJan 15th 2008 3:41PM
My torrent speeds were really suffering for a while then about 3 weeks ago they came right back to normal. I guess they backed off when the investigations began.
keevesJan 15th 2008 6:34PM
Everyone seems to think that it is realy bad that they were throttling the speed, etc. however this is probably advantageous for most users, speeding up normal services, and was probably only done to improve the service that Comcast were offering.
LeeJan 16th 2008 3:42AM
Warning: incoming car analogy
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..this is probably advantageous for most users..
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By the same logic, if police pulled-over everyone driving a red car, everyone else would have an easier time driving to work every morning. Surely that's a good thing?
rndmnmeJan 16th 2008 8:41AM
Actually that would make traffic horrendous because the black, blue, yellow, green, silver, purple, gray, teal, gold, and tan cars would stop to look at the people getting pulled over...
...now if the internet were a series of tubes...