FCC finds Comcast network management practices violate rules

Comcast’s woes over their network management practices seem to be without end. It would help if the company would just fess up, stop it and move on, but this has not been their strategy so far.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of “file sharing” software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said Comcast has “arbitrarily” blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so. (Yahoo)

There’s a deeper problem at work in all of this. It’s the endless ongoing effort by the cable guys and telcos to artificially create bandwidth scarcity. The only real scarcity is in the capacity their last mile infrastructure, which they have continuously refused to adequately upgrade. The larger internet continues to scale up exponentially, with operating costs in a free fall moving closer to zero every day. At the risk of repeating myself: more competition in the last mile will fix the problem without FCC intervention.