
Comcast May Have Found a Net Neutrality Loophole - jamsc
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/comcast-may-have-found-a-major-net-neutrality-loophole/?mbid=social_fb
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LargeCompanies
Can someone help explain how this isn't anti-competitive?

I want to use and enjoy Sling.com and Netflix, yet doing so might cause me to
go over my monthly data cap and in turn be costly. Yet, my Internet provider
who controls the pipes and the arbitrary cap it has placed on me is offering a
OTT type service that doesn't count against my cap; won't be costly to me.

How is that not anti-competitive?

It's a bit amazing that they are trying to pull this when no one likes them
and this makes them look even worse!

~~~
skylan_q
Over-deliver, you're anti-competitive. Over-charge, you're being a monopolist.
Provide what everyone else provides at the price they provide it, you're
colluding.

Businesses are trying to make a buck. The people coming up with and enforcing
regulations are also just trying to make a buck.

~~~
anon4
If Comcast ever over-deliver, I'll eat my hat.

~~~
oldmanjay
I get more download and upload speed than my package includes, and I am a
Comcast customer. use salt, hats are gross.

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modeless
My computer is part of the internet. Comcast is using Internet Protocol to
deliver a service to an internet-connected device which is not owned or
operated by Comcast (my computer). What happens on the other side of the cable
modem is completely irrelevant. How Comcast meters or bills this traffic is
completely irrelevant. This is an internet service by any reasonable
definition.

~~~
thomaskcr
If you look at your cable contract though that's not what you're paying for.
You're paying to be part of Comcast's network in your area, which happens to
be connected to other networks.

Same goes with speed, they aren't promising you 50mbps download from the
internet, they're promising you that speed connection to their network.

~~~
daigoba66
Isn't that essentially true of _any_ ISP? Except that a good ISP just routes
packets without metering, inspecting, or manipulating.

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rubbingalcohol
Microsoft got broken into pieces on antitrust violations for less than this.
Comcast's latest strategy is obviously anticompetitive. I wonder how far they
can push their luck before an ambitious prosecutor takes them down.

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the-dude
Got broken into pieces? Sources please.

IIRC they escaped any meaningful punishment.

~~~
mcintyre1994
[http://time.com/3553242/microsoft-
monopoly/](http://time.com/3553242/microsoft-monopoly/)

This is worth a read, but tldr a judge ordered the split, that was rejected on
appeal and the doj settlement was far less harsh.

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ars
This is hardly a loophole, this is just comcast using their cable to provide
TV service - which is after all, what they do.

Just because it's the same wire, does mean it's internet.

~~~
rewqfdsa
> Just because it's the same wire, does mean it's internet.

Just because it's not the internet doesn't mean that we shouldn't regulate it.
The obvious spirit of the law is preventing the owners of physical
infrastructure from favoring certain content providers (themselves, usually)
over others whatever the technical means by which this unequal treatment is
accomplished.

Yes, this idea means that the FCC should make Comcast count traditional cable
against its customers' data caps.

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geoelectric
Mixed feelings. I do think zero-rating violates net neutrality, however
benignly. This zero-rating is plainly a threat to Netflix and crew, at least
assuming you can random-access shows and not just catch sequential channel
streams.

However, as annoying as it is to see Comcast find a new predatory business
model, I don't see much difference between this and VOIP or even traditional
cable, other than at the terminating end the bridge serves the information
into your local network so that non-dedicated clients can get at it too.

If all this really does is move the functionality of the set-top box into an
app, which is my current read, it's really hard to say this isn't OK.

~~~
TheHydroImpulse
I see their zero-rating as a much smaller issue than the data caps.

"It's ridiculous that in this day and age, people have to worry about their
internet usage like it's some kind of limited resource."

The caps are driving additional zero-rating services.

~~~
rtpg
Well "internet usage" is a limited resource, you need better/more equipment to
support more usage.

"Unlimited Internet" was always a bit of a misnomer, at least now they're
being honest about it

~~~
phicoh
1 Mbit/s sustained translates into a bit above 300 Gbyte per month.

So they can easily get back to fair use by limiting speeds to a couple of
megabits. Of course that would kill streaming tv.

Another way of looking at it, you can listen to audio 24x7 and not go over
quota. Watching tv all day every day is not going to work.

~~~
rtpg
But most people aren't streaming 24 hours a day, but only in a specific
period. So if the plan is 300 GB/month, then having higher speeds is more
interesting than having slower speeds (especially if a slower speed doesn't
let you actually use all your data)

~~~
phicoh
That's sort of where it went wrong. You offer video streaming rates and now
people think, cool, tv, let's turn it on all day.

If you offer data rates where you can afford to offer fair use, then each year
you can offer higher data rates. Which is what people like.

Where I live, I see this problem mostly on mobile. You see telcos offer
insanely high 4G data rates and a data limit that is low enough that you can
burn through that in a couple of minutes.

The net result is that nobody cares anymore. In general, people don't want to
keep track of their uses. It makes for a poor experience.

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brk
It seems that what Comcast is saying is that Internet traffic is "expensive"
and needs to be metered, supposedly because of the costs incurred to maintain
an Internet cross-connect.

However, based on this statement, it seems that Comcast is saying that they
have plenty of in-network capacity. They are "encouraging" customers to stream
video, as long as that video doesn't need to come via an upstream Internet
handoff.

So, by an extension of this logic, Comcast customers should be able to stream
peer-to-peer traffic within the network without it counting towards monthly
caps.

Technically, upstream and downstream data has different "costs" in a cable
network, so I could see an argument where Comcast claims that upstream
traffic, even in a peer-to-peer setup, has costs associated with it. But, I
think that by making statements and policies like this one, Comcast is
actually slowly eroding their ability to limit and cap data, they are
introducing loopholes and work-arounds that could actually be used against
them.

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ricksplat
This is a great example of how regulation can actually nurture innovation.
During the whole net neutrality debate there was much FUD about how it would
hamper business and discourage investment in networks. Yet here we have
business and investment continuing and the customer continuing to get improved
services.

~~~
kabdib
Two words: Data caps.

When Comcast is pushing for-pay IP-based services and then clamps down on all
the others by implementing caps on their data, that is anti-competitive.

Comcast's internal, fully-laden cost for a gigabyte of data delivered to your
home is on the order of a few pennies. Charging several hundred thousand
percent for overage is beyond anti-competitive and well into the extremely
damaging.

Time to write the FCC and FTC again.

~~~
ricksplat
I think in this case it's a question of why there isn't more competition.
Clearly if Comcast's charges are unreasonable or capped at an unreasonably low
amount it should _in theory_ be corrected in a marketplace where customers can
flee to a competitor who isn't fleecing them. Except obviously they can't
where Comcast enjoys a monopoly, is fixing prices with other competitors or
prices are set externally by a "regulator" unanswerable to consumer groups.

I don't think framing this as a net neutrality issue will get you very far -
it's clearly monopolistic behaviour and you should be writing the DOJ looking
for antitrust proceedings ...

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Driphter
I dislike Comcast as much as the next guy, but how is this any different from
the On Demand services they've been offering? Because you can use it on
tablets and laptops? What if they added functionality to their cable boxes
that allowed them to stream the video to devices over the home network?
Wouldn't that be the same thing from the consumers point of view? It seems
like the issue isn't as obvious as it appears...

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caseysoftware
T-mobile is doing exactly the same thing with their own content:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567216)
(from last week)

Why is anyone surprised that they all came up with the same idea at the same
time? Even if we leave out the idea of collusion, why would they all go for
"net neutrality" unless they each thought they could spin it their direction?

I'll note the same thing I did on the original thread:

Get users used to "free" for some thing and if the FCC comes back to slap
them, [provider] says "well, _we_ want to give you free data but the FCC wants
us to charge you for it."

And then people continue using more data and upgrades their plans (or pays for
overages) making them more money or people throw a fit at the FCC.

Either way, [provider] wins.

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jimrandomh
Comcast has a history of being a video streaming/television company. The want
to be a television company. The problem is, their customers don't want them to
be a television company, they want them to be a utility: simple, reliable and
commoditized, like electricity and water. They have the natural monopoly
(wires and rights of way) that makes a utility, and internet access _is_ a
utility in the same way electricity is. But video streaming is naturally
competitive and the only way they can have an advantage there is by sabotaging
their utility side.

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personjerry
So like, why isn't there a company that offers a non-evil alternative to
Comcast yet? Or, how would I go about starting this company?

~~~
izacus
You just need several billion dollars of investment to dig your own cable to
each of the customers and then fight each municipality to actually let you dig
those cables while Comcast is lobbying hard against you :)

~~~
anon4
I think you'll find it easier to get hired as a manager at Comcast, then use
political shenanigans to replace the HR department with a trusted posse of
like-minded individuals and following that replace all of management. Then you
can upgrade the physical infrastructure and to do that, lobby for laws that
will allow other companies to easily install their own.

