Comcast Spent Millions Repealing Net Neutrality, Now Wants You To Believe It Won't Take Full, Brutal Advantage

from the one-born-every-minute dept

Despite the nation's biggest ISP and cable company having spent millions of dollars and lobbying man hours on repealing broadband privacy rules and soon net neutrality protections, executives at the least-liked company in America hope you're dumb enough to believe they won't be taking full advantage.

Comcast has spent months now falsely claiming that it will still adhere to "net neutrality" once the FCC's rules are gutted by Ajit Pai. But the company's pet definition of net neutrality is so narrow as to be effectively meaningless. For example, last week as the FCC was trying to hide its obvious handout to telecom duopolies behind the cranberry and stuffing, Comcast issued a tweet again insisting that you can trust them to be on their best behavior despite the fact there will soon be no meaningful rules holding their feet to the fire:

We do not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content. We will continue to make sure that our policies are clear and transparent for consumers, and we will not change our commitment to these principles. pic.twitter.com/YHDADvFqau — Comcast (@comcast) November 22, 2017

Comcast would have you ignore the fact that net neutrality violations are just a symptom of a lack of competition in the broadband market. They'd also like you to ignore that there's a myriad of ways that ISPs like Comcast have taken advantage of this lack of competition to engage in even worse anti-competitive behavior, with "throttling" and "blocking" just being a small subsection. For example, a lack of competition lets Comcast impose arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, then exempt its own content from those caps while penalizing direct competitors like Netflix.

Comcast also hopes you've forgotten this debate began, in part, when Comcast decided to throttle the upstream traffic of all BitTorrent users on the Comcast network without telling anybody, then lied about it repeatedly. Similarly, Comcast hopes you don't realize that as people grew wise to ham-fisted throttling and blocking, ISPs began abusing net neutrality in other, more "creative" ways -- like intentionally letting peering points congest in order to drive up costs for transit and content operators who foolishly wanted their traffic to reach consumers unimpeded (aka "double dipping," or less generously: extortion).

There's a reason Comcast and other large ISPs are happily promising not to throttle or outright "block" websites: large ISPs now know it's hard to get away with either now that the public and press are more savvy to what they've been up to. They know that blatantly throttling or blocking a website completely would generate a tidal wave of negative PR.

That's why they've long-since moved on to more creative technical abuses of limited competition they can hide behind half-baked techno-babble and semantics, whether that's usage caps and zero rating, charging you more money for privacy, or strangling innovation via their lucrative cable box hardware monopoly.

Anybody that honestly believes that uncompetitive duopolies won't take full, brutal advantage of limited competition and incompetent/corrupt regulators is ignoring history and fooling themselves. Fortunately, most people seem to understand that when it comes to not abusing a lack of competition, large, incumbent telecom providers are the very last companies in America you should trust:

We never will, but it’s very important that we be able to. But we won’t. So let us do it. Because we won’t do it. Which is why we’re spending so much money to make sure we can. But we won’t. But let us. https://t.co/6f3qJupZRS — Lore (@loresjoberg) November 23, 2017

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Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, net neutrality, open internet

Companies: comcast