We don't have the $1 mil to make them pay attention to us, that's why.

It's been said here before, these people are for the free market until they're not. When the free market turns against them they don't "innovate," they instantly go whining to their favorite congress person with a moneybag in their hand.

It's the same for everyone that claims to be "free market." There isn't one truly free market person in Congress on in Corporate America. Whenever you hear that it should cause your B.S. detector to go off.

Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.

This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.

And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in
* Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access
* a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program

Welcome to the future Internet. It's called TV.

I made a comment some months about how this will happen, as the reason why isp's are rolling out bandwidth limits and creating artificial scarcity. most(all) of the isp's doing this have such services of their own and this is an easy way to create incentive to use those services and not competing services. for the consumer it sucks bigtime of course - and the big isp's doing this have no incentive to upgrade their services to higher bandwidths since it works as a method to drive users towards their own services, which even if they don't make money(for the isp) surely count against somebodys bonus matrix plans(which are bullshit of course too).

this is the reason why they don't want net neutrality, why they don't want uncapped connections. they just want to promote their walled garden bullshit services. content providers don't mind as it let's them "monetize" the shows in the old fashion - meaning lots of regional licensing and their staff sitting at bullshit lunches getting hammered while selling something the consumer should be able to buy/view globally directly.

they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.

"All your cap are belong to us"?

Everybody click on all the ads so that Slashdot can afford a proofreader.

Besides, the majority of bandwidth cost to the home is the last mile. The long haul is cheap. In this respect, the difference in cost between streaming from the nearest comcast datacenter vs. the nearest netflix datacenter should be close to the same.

Comcast is both a provider of internet services and a provider of content. What it is doing is bundling its services together to gain an unfair market advantage. It's the same kind of monopolistic practice that Microsoft got sued by, er... every country it does business within. The legal precident here is obvious, as is the conclusion. Whether you call it net neutrality or not, Comcast is doing something unethical and probably illegal as well.

The FCC has remarkably little enforcement capability. Likely, the goal was to name & shame in the most publicly visible way possible, so Netflix could gain some traction on this issue quickly, instead of having to wait around for months for the FCC to do anything useful.

Multicast is for broadcasts where everybody is receiving the same content simultaneously. It doesn't work for what's being discussed here; on-demand playback of individual episodes and movies. That's unicast. Why would Comcast stream the 15th minute of the 4th episode of season 2 of Community to everybody simultaneously, including the guy watching the 6th episode?

You can point to this and tell him or anyone else this is why Net Neutrality is good and not the antithesis of fair competition in an open market.

I highly doubt they are using multicast for this. This isn't IPTV being used to deliver live TV which does work very well with multicast. This is providing on-demand access to a library of content that you can start at any time and control the playback. This doesn't allow the use of multicast.

One man, even with a loud voice, isn't going to make much of a difference. By posting it on Facebook he's hoping to stir the pot and get others up in arms about the unfair nature of this special treatment.

Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?

When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.

I've been advocating a much larger change for some time: forbid any company from being both an infrastructure provider and a service provider.

It seems vitally important to me that Comcast, for example, should not be permitted to string the coaxial cable to your house *as well as* providing internet services, VoIP, and Television over that cable. It inherently creates perverse incentives for them to provide both the infrastructure and the services carried over that infrastructure. Even if they weren't providing their own streaming service, their business interests as a TV provider are undermined by companies like Netflix, so they have an incentive to provide poor Internet service that makes Netflix untenable. Further, the fact that Comcast is also a content owner (via NBC/Universal), they have a perverse incentive to undermine any dealings with Netflix that would put their content on Netflix's streaming service.

There's no real way to prevent these kinds of perverse incentives unless you break Comcast up, the cable infrastructure company on one side, and the media services company on the other. Once they're broken up, regulate the infrastructure company as public infrastructure, and require that they aren't allowed to make special deals with individual companies. That should go a long way towards ensuring net neutrality.

No, it's because you're line sharing with their other customers and they need a way to amortize the cost of the line. Available bandwidth doesn't translate well to small, individual customers, so they approximate based on data transfer... much like a cable company does, except the cable company hits you on both ends (speed and cap).