I'm... confused. I've been under the clear impression for years that Comcast, my service provider, was doing everything in its power to quash bittorrent users. Its been accused of everything from packet shaping to cooperating with the NSA to "spy" on its customers. I've been living under the assumption that at any point my service could be interrupted, slowed, or disconnected because of my occasional torrent use (linux iso's, game of thrones, etc).
While I'm not entirely sure how to take this news, it is certainly food for thought.
It makes sense that Comcast is fighting back primarily for financial reasons, more than trying to protect their customers. The sheer volume of subpoenas must be costing them a lot of money and does nothing to endear us to them.
This, for the record, is an interesting example of the kind of "misaligned incentives" that happen when users demand to receive unlimited value for a fixed payment: by correcting that pricing mistake, we now have regained a political ally.
The problem is not that customers are demanding unlimited value for a fixed payment. The problem is that Comcast is demanding fixed payment for variable value. Comcast is oversold, and when everyone is using their link at the same time, nobody gets what they're paying for (a good data rate.) If Comcast had an SLA, I'd accept the data caps, because there would be a purpose to it. But I pay the same money whether Comcast delivers 100kbps or 20mbps, so I'm rather offended by a data cap which is just a bandaid to their capacity issues.
An SLA is still an unmaintainable way of looking at the bandwidth planning problem. Companies like Comcast cannot offer an SLA using cumulative data caps: they would have to do instantaneous bandwidth caps.
They would thereby need to divide the available channel capacity by the number of users, and would only be able to guarantee "nearly no bandwidth", even if in practice there is constantly capacity to share.
You instead need to think of bandwidth as a public good that is threatened by tragedy of the commons. You have been given access to a field (to graze cows) for a fixed entrance fee, as have a number of other farmers.
This is simple and works great, because most people own two cows, and the field, over the course of a month, can handle everyone bringing their own cows and grazing them. The price is then adjusted for two cows.
However, as initially the way you do this is to just give the keys to the gate to everyone who paid, the result is going to suck: some people are going to realize that they can graze their friends cows, or their giraffe.
Even worse, some asshat is going to just sit there lighting grass on fire just because it is fun; maybe they even have a reason: they are scientists looking into the properties of grass; it is still messing with the pricing.
I will then claim that it is entirely a fair thing to say "ok, you can't graze more than X amount of grass a month" to make the pricing stable. The alternative, infinite grass for fixed cost, simply doesn't make any sense.
There is, however, a second problem that is analogous to the one that you bring up: that everyone's cows become hungry at the exact same time, and there isn't even really room in the field to graze 100 cows /at once/.
This problem is simply not going to be fixable without firm schedules on who is allowed to be in the field at what times; otherwise you are going to just end up with "we can make no guarantees".
Now, you might argue that "no, Comcast can just build out", but now the field is going to have to be 50x larger than it otherwise would need to be to handle this prime time usage, and the price will also need to be 50x.
Maybe you want to pay 50x to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth during rushes on the system, but honestly, as much as I care about and pay extra for bandwidth, I can't imagine I could afford "what it really costs".
We then need to spend time looking at the "firm schedules" problem, and the solution that bandwidth providers are going to eventually need to realize they must adopt is variable pricing depending on when you access it.
This is already done for other utilities: your power costs more during some hours of the day, as does your cellular telephone service. That bandwidth doesn't cost more is a temporary mistake that will also be corrected.
It must be pointed out, though, that in the "pay by the kilobyte with variable pricing" model, you still don't get an SLA. If everyone decides it is worth it to pay for prime-time-powered air conditioning today, there will be a brown out.
Even so, the result /does/ solve your "demanding fixed payment for variable value" complaint: you simply can't get many kilobytes during the prime time usage, so your kilobyte usage meter will not go up much under congestion.
I think that would be reasonable. From my perspective data caps don't solve an actual problem I'm having, and I find it difficult to believe they're solving an actual problem for Comcast either.
Comcast cares about the issue because these requests are costing it money. But if the government should compensate them (as they do for phone tapping), no further protests would occur.
Comcast actually requires a fee from the plaintiff, I've heard it's $45 an IP.
Recently, they've had trouble with certain law firms actually paying these fees in a timely matter which prompted them to start fighting these law suits.
At the rate these suits are being filed, they've really had to staff up. You can't hire someone from a temp agency to work in your legal department.
Reputation counts for little in their virtual local monopolies. Many places it's either them or 3g or satellite. Then again, the public at large doesn't care about these issues.
Only in metro areas and suburbs. In most other places, it's a single provider and you're lucky if that provider decides to offer service to your house.
If Comcast only held the IP address currently assigned to its cable modems, they could argue that they don't know who had that IP address six months ago. Its true that most people leave their cable modems on-line full-time and that the lease period keeps changes to a minimum, but why keep logs. And it could all be done "in an effort to store less customer data" ... there are obviously privacy issues with customer data ;)
At the moment they would be able to do that, but there are bills constantly being introduced (and so far, luckily, shot down) to Congress calling for mandatory data retention. The current bill calling for this is HR 1981:Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr1981), introduced by Rep Lamar Smith of SOPA acclaim.
The article specifically mentioned that they were resisting subpoenas from pornographers. I don't know if the author was intentionally implying that Comcast is ok with other content owners making requests, or if currently the only people making these mass subpoenas happen to be pornographers.
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While I'm not entirely sure how to take this news, it is certainly food for thought.
It makes sense that Comcast is fighting back primarily for financial reasons, more than trying to protect their customers. The sheer volume of subpoenas must be costing them a lot of money and does nothing to endear us to them.