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Charles
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9 months ago
in “Feds and Internet Service Providers Don’t Mix” on The Technology Liberation Front
I don't understand how one can take the side of comcast on the network management issue. Imagine I buy a plan from comcast and the ad tells me "unlimited internet access at speed X" and comcast, without informing me, lowers my connection speed and, after a while, tells me "you're using too many ressources, so we're going to cut you off". How, as a customer, was I not subject to false advertising?
To be clear, I'm not agains bandwidth caps, differential speed pricing, per-byte pricing schemes or preferential treatment of certain applications or protocols. I want comcast to tell me though what the actual terms of my contract are so I can pick a different carrier if I don't like those terms. The free market only works if consumers are told what they're getting.
I don't like the KFC analogy one bit in that respect. This isn't like asking KFC to disclose its recipe. This is more like KFC advertising an "all you can eat" meal where they come by your table to serve you every 10 minutes, except when you actually order the meal, they come by your table twice then stop. Then after an hour, they bring you the bill and tell you to pay and go, there isn't enough food to serve you. So again, I have nothing against KFC only offering "per-chicken" pricing, but they'd better not advertise it as "all you can eat".
I thought that was the 'transparency' at issue here. (Nevermind the net-neutrality arguments that there should be no protocol specific management.)
To be clear, I'm not agains bandwidth caps, differential speed pricing, per-byte pricing schemes or preferential treatment of certain applications or protocols. I want comcast to tell me though what the actual terms of my contract are so I can pick a different carrier if I don't like those terms. The free market only works if consumers are told what they're getting.
I don't like the KFC analogy one bit in that respect. This isn't like asking KFC to disclose its recipe. This is more like KFC advertising an "all you can eat" meal where they come by your table to serve you every 10 minutes, except when you actually order the meal, they come by your table twice then stop. Then after an hour, they bring you the bill and tell you to pay and go, there isn't enough food to serve you. So again, I have nothing against KFC only offering "per-chicken" pricing, but they'd better not advertise it as "all you can eat".
I thought that was the 'transparency' at issue here. (Nevermind the net-neutrality arguments that there should be no protocol specific management.)
1 reply
Ryan Radia
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in its ads for several years. And when it did, the term was in reference to unlimited access, rather than unlimited usage. Recall that back in the days of dail-up, billing was often based on the number of hours connected rather than the number of bytes used. Comcast was touting the fact that its service was always-on so users could connect to the Web anytime without paying by the hour.
