03/10/2008, 3:05pm, EDT
Monday, March 10thFCC head: Comcast has been deceptive
Comcast may have already undermined its position in an ongoing government investigation, according to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Kevin Martin addressed the question in a recent speech at Stanford University Law School, where the subject of Comcast's peer-to-peer sabotage was raised. Martin said he was disturbed that Comcast initially denied throttling peer-to-peer content, only to later claim the practice was standard and necessary.
"A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly," says Martin.
Comcast has defended itself by saying that without traffic shaping, a minority of Internet users can hamper the quality of service for the majority, who do not use much peer-to-peer technology. Critics such as politicians and advocacy groups charge that the cableco is violating the FCC's net neutrality policy, which states that companies cannot give preferential treatment to the data passing through their wires -- much as phone companies cannot decide what conversations are important.
The Wall Street Journal observes that in his Stanford speech, Martin refused to say what penalties Comcast could face if found guilty. In the past, however, he has suggested fines as high as $195,000 for every subscriber impacted by illegitimate bandwidth controls.
Filed under: industry, networking
Other story tags: FCC, Comcast, BitTorrent, net neutrality
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However, since Comcast did not inform its users that this was part of the service, there are grounds for such penalties, unless they didn't guarantee a specific range of data rates in the contracts.
The ethics of such practices aren't going to matter to a court. It's all going to come down to a contract on what is suspected of the provider and consumer. To penalize someone or some organization for actions that were "not nice" or "unusual," but not specifically breaking any laws is even more ridiculous.
In the end, this will probably come down to lying about activies. If Comcast felt justified in its actions that weren't unlawful, they should have just said, "yes, we're doing that and here's why we should be..."
Doofuses.
'"A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly," says Martin.'
If only this common-sense principle could be applied to Bush Administration policies.
Indeed. Automobiles are used all the time to commit crimes. No one is suggesting they should be banned.
And just try that argument out on anybody who owns a handgun, let me know how that works for ya.
Unless they define comcastic as "The feeling you get when you realized you've given your soul over to a pure evil company out to suck every dollar they can out of you!" Then it is spot on.