FCC orders Comcast to stop arbitrarily blocking Internet traffic

by Stephen Withers

Tuesday, 05 August 2008

Page 2 of 4 Some commentators are trying to cast the decision as contradictory, but I believe that is based on a misinterpretation of what the commissioners are saying. The FCC is not saying that Comcast (or any other ISP) is not entitled to manage its network by restricting the amount of bandwidth available to individual customers. What it does say is that such measures should not be arbitrary. Traffic shaping is acceptable when networks are congested, providing it is applied to those parts of the network suffering from congestion. It is not acceptable to single out a particular type of traffic, especially when that would mean interfering with a customer using a small amount of bandwidth at a time when the network is not congested. FCC chairman Kevin Martin explained the situation this way: "Would you be OK with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn't want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped 'address unknown – return to sender'?  Or if they opened letters mailed to you, decided that because the mail truck is full sometimes, letters to you could wait, and then hid both that they read your letters and delayed them?" What made Comcast's practices worse was that "a customer may use an extraordinary amount of bandwidth during periods of network congestion and will be totally unaffected so long as he does not utilize an application disfavored by Comcast." The FCC held that Comcast had an anticompetitive motive to block peer-to-peer traffic as it provides users with "the opportunity to view high-quality video that they might otherwise watch (and pay for) on cable television" such as Comcast's video-on-demand service. Page 3 highlights the part of the commissioners' reasoning that is being overlooked - perhaps deliberately - by critics. << First page <   1 2 3 4 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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