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For years, Comcast has been promising that it won't violate the principles of net neutrality, regardless of whether the government imposes any net neutrality rules. That meant that Comcast wouldn't block or throttle lawful Internet traffic and that it wouldn't create fast lanes in order to collect tolls from Web companies that want priority access over the Comcast network.
This was one of the ways in which Comcast argued that the Federal Communications Commission should not reclassify broadband providers as common carriers, a designation that forces ISPs to treat customers fairly in other ways. The Title II common carrier classification that makes net neutrality rules enforceable isn't necessary because ISPs won't violate net neutrality principles anyway, Comcast and other ISPs have claimed.
But with Republican Ajit Pai now in charge at the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast's stance has changed. While the company still says it won't block or throttle Internet content, it has dropped its promise about not instituting paid prioritization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)
Maybe it is to understood this way: They don't block or throttle the data, they just send it over the congested and slow routes, while the prioritized traffic gets the high-bandwidth and fast routes. So technically they are not blocking (the data arrived, unless the packets are dropped in normal congestion control) nor throttling (they are indeed sending the packets over those links as fast as possible; it's just that they don't chose the fastest links), but the effect is the same (non-prioritized traffic gets slow and unreliable).
To make a car analogy: They open up the highway only for paying customers, but on the standard roads, the cars are allowed to drive as fast as the traffic allows, therefore technically they don't slow down the traffic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:47PM
Yes, there's a big loophole there.
I guess we need to change "game is about scheduling and queueing packets"
to "game is about routing, scheduling, and queueing packets"