Comcast's latest marketing agreement forces censorship of other ISPs

[rcmaehl]

This is a still developing story from Internet Providers by Zip, in which I'll refer to as IPBZ since it's a long name.

 

https://internetprovidersbyzip.com/news/notice-our-users-regarding-comcast-xfinity

 

I've taken a summary from u/an_invisible_girl on reddit here:

Quote

Comcast thought they had the net neutrality repeal in the bag. I guess they didn't count on the Senate repealing it last week, because they showed their true intentions in a marketing agreement that was sent to their affiliates. The agreement demands, among other things, that affiliates only show customers Comcast or the larger ISP's, effectively cutting the smaller local companies out of the competition.

Developments so far:

• Comcast has threatened legal action unless the article is removed
• Comcast pressured IPBZ payment processor to discontinue service for IPBZ
• Comcast has removed all IPBZ urls from their own in-house search engine
• Comcast is now pressuring other partners of IPBZ to discontinue business

 

My thoughts:
 

I knew companies would attempt a lot of sketchy and immoral information such as this at the repeal of Net Neutrality. I didn't expect that they'd try it immediately after they expected Net Neutrality to die however, I'm not surprised at the methods they're using. Hopefully, additional companies will continue to blow the whistle on completely shady business practices such as this even if Net Neutrality gets repealed completely.

[ScratchCat]

Quote

Comcast has removed all IPBZ urls from their own in-house search engine

No one is going to find the article now! /s

[Master Disaster]

But we don't need net neutrality, the internet survived just fine without it for how ever many years before it, big companies don't need legislation to tell them how to do business. Remember?

 

Yeah, Net Neutrality isn't even fully dead yet and they've already started to pull this shit.

[Bananasplit_00]

wait so how many more votes does it need to reinstate NN? i doubt its getting past the orange man either way

[GoldenLag]

This will be the end of the end of net neutrality.

 

Thanks shady, lobbying ISPs for screwing up

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

wait so how many more votes does it need to reinstate NN? i doubt its getting past the orange man either way

The Orange man will probably listen. He doesnt have a politcal alignment, but if he known as they guy who killed net neutrality, then he is gonna suffer where it hurts most.

[Rune]

Screw ISPs.

[Sniperfox47]

Clearly Comcast isn't doing anything wrong here! They're just protecting their interests! We should just let the free market do what it does! If we let everyone screw everyone as hard as they can it will all work out for the best, right? /s

 

Although to be fair, there isn't really anything in here afaict that relates to Net Neutrality in any way shape or form. There's no talk about restricted bandwidth flow or restricted site access. They just did  what Comcast does and abuse their economic influence to manipulate vendors into isolating this company.

 

I think the people here associating this with net neutrality may be using this to confirm their bias without stopping to consider that it's probably not super related.

[Taf the Ghost]

1) This has jack-all to do with NN.

2) Comcast has been assholes since they started.

3) This is much more like the Nvidia GPP than anything else in recent memory.

4) This is potentially an issue under Anti-Competitive Practices Law, and should be addressed that way.

5) Someone really should fire whatever marketing director came up with this approach.

[rcmaehl]

28 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

1) This has jack-all to do with NN.

...

3) This is much more like the Nvidia GPP

I'd have to disagree, there's a difference between

Company A forcing companies to following naming conventions

 

compared to

 

Company B attempting to block information and availability of other Companies

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, rcmaehl said:

I'd have to disagree, there's a difference between

Company A forcing companies to following naming conventions

 

compared to

 

Company B attempting to block information and availability of other Companies

Neither of which has *anything* to do with net neutrality.

[Granular]

11 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Neither of which has *anything* to do with net neutrality.

It's a mark against a company that decries net neutrality as undermining innovation, not monopolies.

[Misanthrope]

Fascinating that they would callously disregard all of the "free market" values people keep preaching about.

[Tellos]

NN strictly deals with the priortization of data thats it. In so muc has you CANNOT so your e-mail and soem guys latancy uncocnerned data gets the same chance at priorty as your very latency restricted video. Please research NN before talking about it.

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, Tellos said:

NN strictly deals with the priortization of data thats it. In so muc has you CANNOT so your e-mail and soem guys latancy uncocnerned data gets the same chance at priorty as your very latency restricted video. Please research NN before talking about it.

That's not strictly true. Net neutrality is about prioritization of both packet latency and bandwidth. It's not just about who's packets go first, but also how many packets they can send in a certain amount of time. It's as much to do with throttling and restricting access to sites as it is about packet priority.

 

That's the reason people have been so concerned that sites would be essentially blackmailed into paying ISPs if they want a "fast lane" because Net Neutrality deals, in a large part, with bandwidth limitations and throttling. And blocking access to a site is, essentially, just a throttle to a speed of 0.

[Tellos]

@Sniperfox47 I know thisand fast lanes wont throttle you I work for the company in question. Ironicly throttling doesint serve much purpose you find. Bandwith cant be "Saved" it is there used or not. DOCSIS as some quirks that make prioprtization much more noticible because of it's maximum peer ports per node situation. But lets indulge here. What does any ISP gain by slowing your access to say this site?Infanstructure costs the same, bandwith still same cost you have not saved any bandwith or any costs so whats the benefit?

[Sniperfox47]

9 minutes ago, Tellos said:

@Sniperfox47 I know thisand fast lanes wont throttle you I work for the company in question. Ireonicly throttling doesint serve much purpose you find. Bandwith cant be "Saved" it is there used or not. DOCSIS as soem quirks that make prioprtization much more noticible because of it's maximum peer ports per node situation. But lets indulge here. What does any ISP gain by slowing your access to say this site?Infanstructure costs the same, bandwith still same cost you have not saved any bandwith or any costs so whats the benefit?

What are you talking about? Throttling serves a massive purpose. Since people's willingness to engage with a service is largely based on the TTL (Time to load) for that service, and throttling can drastically change that time, you're able to shape consumer engagement and traffic.

 

It's not about saving bandwidth or saving network infrastructure, it's about opening up more monetization avenues.

 

If you're say Comcast, who has a TV network you can throttle the likes on Netflix. This makes Netflix less appealing to your customers, and therefore more likely to spend on other media provider services such as Comcast's television service or an alternative online streaming service that they provide in the future.

 

Again if you're say Comcast and a large portion of your users use a service like Facebook, you can threaten to throttle your users' connection to Facebook's servers if Facebook doesn't pay you. This would leave Facebook in a position where it either has to pay Comcast or have traffic directed away from their site.

 

It's not a concern about bandwidth saving or network infrastructure, it's a concern about traffic shaping and market manipulation.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

1) This has jack-all to do with NN.

2) Comcast has been assholes since they started.

3) This is much more like the Nvidia GPP than anything else in recent memory.

4) This is potentially an issue under Anti-Competitive Practices Law, and should be addressed that way.

5) Someone really should fire whatever marketing director came up with this approach.

I pretty much axed my home internet to spite Comcast (no other choice here besides cellular, which I use, and maybe expensive DSL).

[mr moose]

Meanwhile those of us with government run Internet infrastructure have the choice of 127 ISP's, all of which wouldn't dare pull this shit for how easy it is to change providers.

 

 

[Brooksie359]

13 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

But we don't need net neutrality, the internet survived just fine without it for how ever many years before it, big companies don't need legislation to tell them how to do business. Remember?

 

Yeah, Net Neutrality isn't even fully dead yet and they've already started to pull this shit.

They were pulling sketchy practices for awhile their and got caught and sued over it. If it weren't for the fact that it was illegal they would have gotten away with it so I fail to see how people can say it didn't do anything. Also the whole idea of no government regulations only works well with a free market and even then there is some need for regulation. Here there are region based monopolies on broadband internet so companies can get away with doing whatever they want as there really isn't any other option. At the end of the day repealing net neutrality only hurts consumers. I can't think of a single reason why net neutrality would have a negative impact on isps other than not allowing to pull throttling b.s. and priority lanes. That the biggest issue is that what other motive is there to repeal it other than for exploitation of companies and consumers?

[Ryujin2003]

Soon, Comcast will be the only ISP to be advertised to gamers. We wouldn't want gamers to be mislead by non gaming IDPs after all...

 

Again, I've had Comcast once in my life, and the experience was bad enough I won't buy a house anywhere unless I have Verizon. Seriously one of the worst ISPs I've ever experienced.

[Tellos]

On 5/28/2018 at 7:05 AM, Sniperfox47 said:

What are you talking about? Throttling serves a massive purpose. Since people's willingness to engage with a service is largely based on the TTL (Time to load) for that service, and throttling can drastically change that time, you're able to shape consumer engagement and traffic.

 

It's not about saving bandwidth or saving network infrastructure, it's about opening up more monetization avenues.

 

If you're say Comcast, who has a TV network you can throttle the likes on Netflix. This makes Netflix less appealing to your customers, and therefore more likely to spend on other media provider services such as Comcast's television service or an alternative online streaming service that they provide in the future.

 

Again if you're say Comcast and a large portion of your users use a service like Facebook, you can threaten to throttle your users' connection to Facebook's servers if Facebook doesn't pay you. This would leave Facebook in a position where it either has to pay Comcast or have traffic directed away from their site.

 

It's not a concern about bandwidth saving or network infrastructure, it's a concern about traffic shaping and market manipulation.

Problom with this, we got a deal with netflix for our Cable boxes that uses the internet, why would I want that to be throttled for a service I use that runs on my fucking internet service. See the X1 platform hosts apps off that modem we give you. So no it actually harms our services horribly, or the pandora or youtube app we placed on X1. Or Hulu which we own a third of. Or any of NBC universals own stream services. Again throttling does not actually serve us well. We also have too many other things attached to our interent like phone, home security etc. So to make a seamless system we cant be throttling our customers. So no this does not actually help us since you know not how our products work on that level I am unsurprised. That TV is not broadcast it's TV over IP. So um I need smooth internet traffic to not get a pixalted mess. So given we are moving to a set of systems built onto the backbone of our internet including various apps like stream app designed to offer live TV on wifi or home wired internet where again is it helping? We cant seporate that from the modem sicne it carries the speed tier info.

[andpeterson]

On 5/28/2018 at 4:22 AM, rcmaehl said:

This is a still developing story from Internet Providers by Zip, in which I'll refer to as IPBZ since it's a long name.

 

https://internetprovidersbyzip.com/news/notice-our-users-regarding-comcast-xfinity

 

I've taken a summary from u/an_invisible_girl on reddit here:

Developments so far:

• Comcast has threatened legal action unless the article is removed
• Comcast pressured IPBZ payment processor to discontinue service for IPBZ
• Comcast has removed all IPBZ urls from their own in-house search engine
• Comcast is now pressuring other partners of IPBZ to discontinue business

 

My thoughts:
 

I knew companies would attempt a lot of sketchy and immoral information such as this at the repeal of Net Neutrality. I didn't expect that they'd try it immediately after they expected Net Neutrality to die however, I'm not surprised at the methods they're using. Hopefully, additional companies will continue to blow the whistle on completely shady business practices such as this even if Net Neutrality gets repealed completely.

Need to find me a new ISP @_@

[Nowak]

5 minutes ago, andpeterson said:

Need to find me a new ISP @_@

Good luck with that.

[andpeterson]

1 minute ago, NowakVulpix said:

Good luck with that.

It's too bad that Comcast is the strongest connection in my area. I have 4 other companies here but They don't seem to have great plans...