Comments on: FCC: No plans for a Comcast-BitTorrent hearing at Stanford

Chairman Kevin Martin dismisses rumors that a formal FCC public hearing at Stanford University is in the works, saying he's merely giving a speech there later this week.

[perfectblue97]

Mixed feelings

While I support the idea of net neutrality, I can't help but feel that it is the right of a network to shape the traffic across infrastructure that it paid for so as to best suit its paying customers.

I don't want to pay a premium for VOIP and IPTV services just to find that my service is degraded because a bunch of frat-boys down the street on a different ISP are clogging up my ISP's routers downloading pirate movies.

[spruceman]

Re: Mixed Feelings

And what if the ISP is shaping traffic by throttling down your IPTV because they think some hi-def movie you're watching is clogging up their network? Why is the assumption made so often that folks doing large downloads are pirating? There are many perfectly legal bitrate-intensive downloads. Should I assume that everyone driving down my street more than 4 times a day is a burglar?

Oh well! No sense in the FCC holding more hearings on the subject if Comcast is going to pack the hearing room ahead of time and it prevents the general public from commenting. I guess the FCC might need to "shape the traffic" across the hearing-room infrastructure so alternative views can be heard.

[CmdrRickHunter]

false advertising

I'm behind net neutrality because it forces ISP transparency. You worry about paying for premium VoiP and losing it because some else is pirating movies. I point out this should not happen. It happens, but not because of the frat boys. It happens because the ISP marketing divisions have gotten away with spinning an ABSURD tale. Once ISPs have to sell the bandwidth they actually have, instead of selling fantasy bandwidth, straight up economics will solve your little problem. The problem is ISPs are selling 7/1 megabit connections which they don't actually have. They always reasoned "oh, people can't actually use that much." Well we can now. They need to adjust accordingly.