Comcast has begun imposing a fee on Internet middleman Level 3 Communications, one of the companies that Netflix has hired to deliver movies and TV shows to Web customers.
Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet “toll booth,” charging Level 3 whenever customers request content, the Broomfield, Colorado-based company said in a statement yesterday.
Level 3 plans to complain to U.S. regulators who may enact so-called net-neutrality rules next month. The Federal Communications Commission is seeking to bar phone and cable providers from interfering with legal traffic on their networks. The rules are backed by President Barack Obama and companies led by Google, EBay and IAC/InterActiveCorp. Phone and cable companies say rules aren’t needed and may hurt investment.
“This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access,” Thomas Stortz, Level 3’s chief legal officer, said in the statement. “With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid.”
Comcast, which is seeking regulatory approval to acquire majority ownership of NBC Universal, defended the fee in a statement, saying it is based on “long established and mutually acceptable commercial arrangements” with Level 3’s peers…
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in proposing net neutrality rules last year, called for a principle of non- discrimination by Internet-service providers. The FCC will meet on Dec. 21.
“This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks,” Genachowski said.
If you don’t pay the toll, your traffic doesn’t go through – or Comcast will slow it down enough to make it unwatchable.
I will be very surprised if the FCC does anything. Our entire government has been bought and paid for.
“long established and mutually acceptable commercial arrangements” with Level 3’s peers… /// Yep, getting sued for monopolistic quashing of competitors but its all “mutually acceptable.”
It would be hard to get that stink off, if our dear regulators had any noses.
I really don’t know how I feel about this. If NetFlix is getting an unreasonable free ride on Comcast’s backbone, then there should be some sort of fee. On the other hand, if Comcast had reinvested a reasonable portion of their absurd profits into meeting a demand that has been foreseen for years, then this increased demand wouldn’t be a problem.
This whole country should have been fiber optic wired by now. Obama wants jobs? Ok. Start a national program to lay a piece of optical fiber to every doorstep. Lot of jobs there. And a lot of benefit to this country. Then subject the telecos & ISPs to regulation as public utilities.
As expected, Republicans oppose Net Neutrality.
The bought off Repukes want data prioritized or de-prioritized based on its type, source, and location.
Why? Because the scumbags are bought off by the Comcasts of the world. In addition to lining their pockets, Comcast will stream sheeple propaganda in high definition.
Problem with NetNeutrality is that it must not be done by FCC, never mind by their current law proposal. However, something needs to be done (I don’t buy that Netflix or anyone is getting a free ride…).
Problem with FCC is that there are so many loopholes in the law proposed by them that Comcast probably could pull something like this anyway. Worse, bill is full of language with open definitions to be interpreted by whoever is in charge of FCC at the moment. I see that as open door for Govt. abuse while Left is in power or bought and paid for interpretation when Right is in power.
The only way out is Constitutional: define any Internet communication as a free speech. Completely fundamental interpretation of Founders. Needed as they couldn’t imagine the Internet to specify it. You can’t obstruct or tamper with free speech, by definition. No need for corrupt FCC in the middle to make things worse. Actually, in such case FCC too would be banned of any meddling into the Internet. As it should be.
@#4 Right (properly) opposes current implementation idea for NetNeutrality. I am sure that part of the equation is “bought and paid for” but there is the part where they are right: with FCC able to regulate Internet its basic freedom is gone. And that is extremely important part. Same as with current “give your liberties for safety” trend. You’ll notice the harm when liberties are gone but it will be too late.
Most on the Right would support NetNeutrality in which both Govt. and businesses are prohibited from meddling into the Internet. But than Left can’t push their BigGovt agenda of meddling with it…
@dusanmal
The Republicans talk a good smaller government game but their record shows they love BigGovt as much as Democrats. Stop thinking that the Republicans have ANY moral high ground. They are ALL bought and paid for.
“If NetFlix is getting an unreasonable free ride on Comcast’s backbone, then there should be some sort of fee.”
There’s no free ride. They’re getting 50+ bucks a month from each streamer. This is about blocking competition to their VOD content. They want you to cripple your internet service so you can pay them 5 bucks a movie instead of 8 a month to their competitor for unlimited.
To me, it sounds like dusanmal is viewing the republicans as “the enemy of my enemy” more than supporting them, hence the “I am sure that part of the equation is “bought and paid for”. I don’t think dusanmal is one of the bobbo heads.
Well, let me also cheer dismal on: as all Pukes do, he insightfully counsels: “Most on the Right would support NetNeutrality in which both Govt. and businesses are prohibited from meddling into the Internet.” I guess only god can/should manage the interwebitubes, and we all know, the Pukes have god on their side.
What a dope. Although to be fair, this does sound like more like a typo than what dismal (should have??–usually??) types. “Usually” dismal and his ilk only want to keept government meddling out of their programs like Medicare and National Security. By excluding the private sector as well, one has to wonder how far the paranoia and stupidity goes? Dismal surely isn’t thinking of him self or his computer club is he?
Are you?
Ha, ha. Yes, in the middle of the worst depressions caused by undoing governmental controls, we have those who still support thrusting that knife as deep as possible into our collective throat.
Dismal. Dismal indeed.
#1 nailed it. In this fascist plutocracy the winners are the company owners and the losers are the customers stuck with anything but an open marketplace, and that’s not going to change under a Republican Congress.
Just for my info, as I am not a tech guy, don’t I ALREADY PAY COMCAST for my cable service? Used to have download and upload limits and had to pay more for bandwidth and what not. And with that revenue stream, Comcast got filthy rich and my rates go up every 6 months on a billing form that rivals my old phone bill for designed complexity.
Why do/should any “content provider” have to pay for stilling up Comcast’s tubes when I already have?
Is “net neutrality” even an issue or is double gouging the real issue==possible ONLY BY monopolistic market positions. The FCC, contrary to dismal’s ilk needs to be HIGHLY REGULATED just like a utility because thats what it is. Screw all these vertical monopolists who want the cum from both ends.
This is why any internet TV will be dead unless a neutral web is passed. The Cable companies pay a lot to Networks for programming and most American’s with broadband buy either TV,broadband or both from a cable company. Unless one of these Internet TV sites starts running cable to homes. The cable companies have you cornered.
Ditto on the free ride thing. No such thing. We’ve all been paying right along.
Didn’t Google buy up a lot of dark fiber? Wouldn’t it be great if they undercut Comcast, et al, and started some real competition?
I think #12 and #3 have the right idea. I was talking to my mother a couple of nights ago and was astonished to hear she pays over $150/month for a fairly basic cable, broadband and telephone (not Comcast). When I asked her how much of that was for the broadband, she couldn’t figure out the bill. She was going to scan and email it to me but she said it was 8 pages long! EIGHT pages??? And she doesn’t even get HBO or Showtime or even ESPN (and she does like the local basketball team).
With rates like that, they should have been reinvesting in upgrading the system for years. The phone and cable companies in America have made a real art of obfuscating their pricing structure and gouging their customers. They often operate as monopolies and where there is some competition they seem to fix prices!
Maybe it is time to take them back into the regulated community. They no longer provide luxuries but a necessity of modern life. Hell, even US Gov forms ask you for your email address, these days!
The only real alternative is for the Gov to nationalize the fiber and lease it to the lowest bidders – always at least two – so there is some real competition.
Need the Internet to be handled as a COMMON CARRIER WITH A UNIVERSAL SERVICE MANDATE – JUST LIKE TELEPHONES !!! Get the content producers out of the transmission business !!! Only way to get reasonable rates with extortionate tolls !!!
Wow! #3 to #16 got it right in one.
I completely agree.
Cable companies need to just disappear with the roll-out of fiber-to-the-home (as promised and paid for in the seventies but never delivered by the greedy telcos until now…)
Gee, Comcast… Anti-competitive much?
When the fibre hits the home, that will be the next HUGE technological revolution after the original internet.
Remember when they used copper and cable to do those things?
The first information utility to do it will own the entire ‘known’ universe.
Google? AT&T? Verison? China Telecom? Anybody?
I WANT MY OPTICAL NETWORK! AND I WANT IT NOW!
#19, except its not free enterprise at all. Comcast was given monopolies by the government. A free enterprise, i.e. Capitalistic approach would be if anyone was allowed to come into say.. New York, lay their own cables down, and start providing internet. Try that in New York, and see how far you get.
Personally my belief is to have the least amount of government as possible. However, this problem was caused by government to begin with. How about this:
In areas where comcast has been given a monopoly to provide cable by the locality or state, they are required to adhere to net neutrality restrictions (all data treated equally, ect).
However in an area where they have not been given a monopoly on cable (which is nowhere) they will be allowed to put whatever toll both they want on their lines.
I used to live in an area where Comcrap was in a 2 cable provider area. I used WOW, but just because they had better support. They were priced about the same as ComCrap.
I am now in a ComCrap only service area. It took them 2 weeks and 5 service visits to figure out how to install a cable card in my TIVO. Actually, I called TIVO and told their Techs what the problem was, and it still took them 4 hours to fix it. Ever since then many of my basic channels (NBC, FOX, and Comedy Central) have been dropping out. 3 service calls and it still aint fixed.
Comcraps service is horrible.
Oh yea, my Netflix streaming has been much worse on the Comcast network than on the WOW network also. I think they are intentionally f***ing with the Netflix streams, but I don’t have a way to prove it.
Don
In the interest of providing fair and balanced reporting, and public representation, I will now make an observation that, if this article were on general public display, you would most definitely hear.
OMG, do you see how fat that fuckin’ cat is?!!
We now continue with our regularly scheduled discussion.
all bits are created equal. if this continues and gets laws formed around it to support comcast, the internet as we know it is dead. what will they throttle next? pandora? porn? youtube? streaming podcasts? comcast is just mad that people are using netflix instead of watching shit on their crappy service. things like this really scare me. i seriously think the internet as we know it is going to vanish one day very very soon….
want to know when the republicans will react? when the comcast/nbc merger is complete, and you then see comcast pulling the plug on fox news as well as interfering with the on-line streams of fox news, rush, hannity, and the other right wingers. not until then. once they lose access to the masses, they will then pass net neutrality. not a moment before.
The way this works is that Comcast opposes having it’s own subscribers viewing Netflix. Comcast does the ‘final mile’ delivery of whatever the subscriber to it’s services requests, Comcast does not carry download data to people that do not subscribe to it’s services. If you don’t use Comcast, you probably never touch the Comcast network.
So essentially Comcast is saying “We want to penalize our own subscribers for choosing Netflix by making Netflix cost more.”
Netflix is actually carried by “Level-3”, and in January Level-3 is deploying multiple datacenters containing full copies of the entire 20,000 Netflix movie catalog so that streaming will happen much more locally. Comcast subscribers will pull their Netflix from the Level-3 systems, because they choose to watch Netflix. Comcast NEVER carries Netflix for people that do not subscribe to Comcast, so the bandwidth is entirely being paid by what that suscriber of Comcast is requesting. Netflix is not imposing free carriage at all, since it does not use Comcast bandwidth that Comcast subscribers are not requesting directly as part of their service.
In summary, Comcast wants to make it more expensive for their subscribers to use non-Comcast services. They could make their services cheaper or more comprehensive to actually compete with Netflix, but as a de-facto monopoly they would rather just charge as much as possible and impede competition.
If you do not support “Net-Neutrality”, then you are saying “I want Netflix to become pay-per-view on Comcast” with the extra money going to Comcast for the privilege of having access to your Netflix subscription.
Its amazing how gullible the right wing sheep are in their opposition to “net neutrality”. The GOP sells “net neutrality” as being the internet version of the “fairness doctrine”, thus getting overwhelming opposition.
But the exact opposite is true.
Net neutrality is about protecting free speech and letting the market dictate what gets popular, not having the corporate oligarchy dictate what you are supposed to be accessing.
I agree with #1 however I’m being charged for high speed DSL that was sold to me on the grounds it was what I need to download video.
Charging the agent I’m downloading again seems to be less than fair especially when I’m going to end up picking up the tab again.
If this article is correct, then Comcast might be less evil.
http://digitalsociety.org/2010/11/level-3-outbid-akamai-on-netflix-by-reselling-stolen-bandwidth/
Wait, shouldn’t Level 3 be charging Comcast for the privilege of Comcast’s customers having access the its data? One of these two is a destination and the other is not.