Unlimited gall to cost Verizon $1 million; Congressman to Comcast: Stop interfering with BitTorrent

Network World, C/Net ^ | October 24, 2006; October 25, 2006 | Paul McNamara; Chris Soghoian

[dickmc]

I have lumped these together as they are symptomatic of underlying interesting issues on corporations vs internet issues:

The first is Verizon's definition of unlimited:
New York State has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.

The second is a Congressman's comments on Comcast's forging of reset commands to stop BitTorrent legal downloads:
"Comcast has made a major mistake in attempting to hinder peer-to-peer file sharing as an aspect of its network management," Boucher said. "The inability of customers to (share files) significantly diminishes their ability to utilize the Internet for one of its most important applications, which is user-to-user content." He also noted that "file sharing is already being used for a wide variety of perfectly lawful and appropriate applications."

[dickmc]

Now, back to Verizon’s take on what 'unlimited' means? According to the article: It’s priceless:

"We are pleased to have cooperated with the New York Attorney General and to have voluntarily reached this agreement," a company spokesman told Associated Press. "When this was brought to our attention, we understood that advertising for our NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess services could provide more clarity."

As the author comments: "And the real whopper: What we’re talking about here is a lack of “clarity” in the advertising, nothing more. … You’d think a multibillion-dollar company could afford a dictionary."
Read more at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20981

As for Comcast and net neutrality, the other article goes on to state:

Discussing the realities of limited resources that the company faces, Boucher said, "Comcast obviously needs to engage in some aspect of network management. The company has limited bandwidth, and there are times when there is more demand for service than the infrastructure can support." However, the congressman stressed that "(the) management needs to occur in a more evenhanded way" and that "(Comcast) should not engage in a blanket disqualification of any category of lawful applications."

Until last month, the opponents of Net neutrality were doing just great. The issue, which had become one of national importance in 2006, had shrunk to a mere footnote in the annals of tech policy history.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh wrote about the death of Net neutrality last month, stating that "(the issue) went from being the political equivalent of a first-run Broadway show, with accompanying street protests and high-profile votes in Congress, to a third-rate performance with no budget and slumping attendance."

Luckily for fans of a free Internet, the telecommunications companies are extremely shortsighted. Thanks to a number of their boneheaded moves, Net neutrality has gone from being all but dead to a major news story--all in just a matter of weeks.
You can read more of the article at http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9804158-7.html

.

As you can imagine, the comments on Slashdot on the two articles are delicious at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/25/1237202 and http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/25/164247 respectively.