Comcast May Have Found a Net Neutrality Loophole | Hacker News Reader

Comcast May Have Found a Net Neutrality Loophole

wired.com

55 pointsjamsc50 comments

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!

It's not like anti-competitive, monopolistic situations are new for cable companies. When that behavior is already your business model, and not only legal but in some cases protected by local governments... Well, if it ain't broke...

Couldn't Netflix setup IPTV as an option to the user to take advantage of the same loophole? or maybe the FCC could classify all streamed videos as IPTV...

That's just kicking the same can down the road and letting Comcast think of some other expensive obstacle for Netflix to favor their own services.

Not sure if the FCC has a set definition for IPTV that would make Netflix not IPTV ... if they don't, it would just require Netflix to say "we are IPTV too".

They'll run out of loopholes eventually...

The thing is, it's _not_ an OTT service and that is why it isn't considered Internet traffic. It is offering a slimmed down cable tv package for a low price, and you use your own devices instead of a cable box.

Yes, but Netflix has and is the defacto streaming service to your own personal device. No matter how it's delivered if it walks and quacks like a duck it's a duck.

This is a bullet straight at Netflix and all other OTT services and the following Comcast rep to consumer conversation will go as followed....

Customer service rep, "Sure you can use Netflix and enjoy through any Internet device, but your going to have to be concerned about going over your monthly cap, which can get costly." "Though with our Stream TV you don't have to worry about that, you can stream all you want to your personal devices and it will never cost you more per month."

Awful.. anti-competitive ... needs to be shot down now!

Their former chief lobbyist is now their chief regulator.

If you are talking about Wheeler and the FCC, that is wrong.

Wheeler has never been employed by Comcast. He was once the head of the main cable trade association--over 30 years, when (1) Comcast was insignificant, (2) there were no cable ISPs as there was no public internet yet, and (3) being a cable lobbyist meant being on the pro-consumer side since cable was the small underdog going against the big broadcasters.

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.

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

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

Its direct manipulation of your behavior through economics. What if your water company started pretending to be out of water then offered free car washes where they had placed ads playing 24/7? Luckily, the engineers in charge of most utilities are concerned with the technical challenges of meeting the market level of demand, not inventing awful business models that no one wants.

"What if your water company started pretending to be out of water then offered free car washes where they had placed ads playing 24/7?"

Then they'd be lying.

It's anti-competitive to use one business to over-subsidize another to get market share. Bundling IE, anti-competitive. Dropping the price below cost in a town that's getting fiber from someone else, anti-competitive.

Comcast improving price or speed or caps over their entire network is what everyone wants.

And if the caps had anything to do with infrastructure costs, they should be doubling every year or two. Instead we're up from 250GB in 2008 to 300GB in 2015.

But I wouldn't want to watch Comcast's service because its crap. So how are they "over delivering" as you put it?

I'm not following.

People are getting their bandwidth allotment AND additional services. Your contempt for them doesn't mean that they're anti-competitive.

I am not getting the service I care about. I am getting crapware.

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.

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.

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

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.

Got broken into pieces? Sources please.

IIRC they escaped any meaningful punishment.

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.

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.

> 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.

Yes, but they have created an arbitrary cap that they will market to consumers and then turn around and market streamTV to those now weary consumers.

As a previous Comcast phone rep I can see them pushing both of the above hard. Which is shockingly and grossly anti-competitive.

They are terrible and I can't imagine this standing!

The technicalities might be different, that is true. But the end customer can't see the difference without understanding a little of the technical details. The customers experience seems closer to: If I pay $15 per month, I get access to this group of websites (possibly accessed only through comcast's website on a limited number of registered devices so long as I'm at home) without it counting towards my data. Sure, we could start teaching people the technical details, but Comcast doing such has quite a climb, since they aren't exactly liked or trusted to be truthful or treat customers well. The FCC might have better luck with the educational portion.

Is this a broadcast service? (i.e. limited number of channels, everyone choosing the same channel gets the same content).

If so, it is a TV service, otherwise it's obviously not.

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.

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.

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

The beneficial solution to the customers and the country as whole is to kick the providers to upgrade the infrastructure, not to let them suppress the marked by sitting on obsolete infrastructure and killing the competition.

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.

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)

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.

Zero-rating is explicitly not forbidden by the FCC's net neutrality rules.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Comcast will be getting charged to peer with other network operators, this new service does reflect the costs that Comcast will incur. The answer might be for Netflix to install their own CDN hardware at Comcast data centres.

Another company using the same business model is BT in the UK, they have their own sports channels that don't count towards your usage limits.

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...

T-mobile is doing exactly the same thing with their own content: 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.

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.

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?

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 :)

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.

There are: netflix and googlefiber.

One is hamstrung by datacaps, the other by politicians, many of whom have campaigns funded by comcast.

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