New Network Neutrality Laws May Do Little > NN Does Not & Will Not Address BT Prevention

NN Does Not & Will Not Address BT Prevention

All consistent with enforcing the terms of service their residential customers have agreed to abide by.

reply to funchords
Advertisement... Terms of Service.. and Press Release/Statement.

Please define those for me.

I'm pretty sure it's still illegial and false advertising to advertise one thing, and set the opposite in the TOS, like advertising support for P2P apps, and the TOS bans them (via banning servers or whatever technicality they like to put in).

Contrary to misinformed popular belief bit torrents are not P2P, they are distributed file hosting and substantially used by business to distribute product by leaching off of residential customers of ISPs rather than purchasing suitable service for themselves.

The end result is that residential customers end up breaching at least two items of the terms of service they agreed to abide by.
1) not to use the service to run/operate/host/etc. servers.
2) not to provide the service to third parties.

The ISPs terms of service do not ban bit torrents. For example if all the contents of a file you wish to download via a bit torrent is properly hosted by people with business service permitting the hosting of servers etc. the download should work fine. If the bit torrent requires you to also be a content host then you too should be on business service.

Download to your hearts content, but do not blame your ISP for the inability of providers to properly host their content.

reply to jp10558

reply to NOYB
VERY well said!

reply to fiberguy
I've noticed you haven't replied to my reply to you elsewhere on this board where I quoted Comcast advertising.

It's one thing to expect advertising to be a contract (I don't) and another to expect the ad to have some small tenuous relation to reality.

Comcast advertises their broadband service for movies, music, working from home and frequent downloads of large files. Many companies do similar ads.

In the above post they show what a spoksperson for comcast said about P2P...

A search on comcast.com for p2p yealds this as the second result: »www.comcast.com/customers/faq/Fa···?ID=4390

And I quote "Do you block access to peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent?
No. We do not block access to any Web site or applications, including BitTorrent. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online. "

Sounds like supporting P2P to me... Otherwise I expect their answer would read like this:

Yes we block P2P apps. We do not support P2P nor do we allow our customers to use it for legal and network performance reasons.

Stop putting words in Comcast's mouth, or moreso taking words out of their advertising. Judges have found again and again for customers in these sorts of situations (No Late Fees + Blockbuster - same sort of situation) or big companies are settling (See Seagate + 1GB vs 1GiB) ...

You don't have to be exact, but you can't advertise using a device or service one way and have your TOS say something entirely different.

reply to NOYB

reply to fiberguy
I've presented facts, with links to comcasts own website (unless you're going to claim I've hacked the site and change it) in this post:
»Re: What is 'reasonable'
which was a direct reply to you, so you ought to find it via BBRs own forum features.

If you can't look at your watched topics and use the features available on websites, it's no suprise that you cannot read the actual ads on Comcasts site. Have you even LOOKED at the site I'M QUOTING?

reply to NOYB

reply to NOYB

reply to jp10558
Why did I need to reply to that? Do you reply to each and every post you ever make? I don't think so.

Besides, as I said.. it wasn't worth replying to.. sorry, nothing personal. The ONLY Thing in that post that I would have replied to was the part where you said "where does it say..." to which, as I said, I've had that argument many times.

You're right, thanks to features of this website, I don't think one needs to go on record over and over and over again on the same issue.

My reason no to reply to that was simple - 'typical residential usage' does not equate to 'pushing it to the extreme' or 'running it wide open 24/7' or 'using it to its fullest advantage' (which can mean wide open).

People don't like to look at the parts of written documents that would debunk their arguments so they often over look it.

Me? I'm tired of pointing out the obvious to people over and over only so they can say "that means nothing to me"... so I don't unless I chose to.

And, as for the ads.. read the fine print. As long as the fine print is legal, and a law set forth by those that make laws, I will follow the law. The fine print, which I will agree is a shitty way to do things, is legal, and WE ALL KNOW it's there - yet, again, people will say that it's too much work to read it. Oh well. That's their fault. At least people acknowledge that its there so there is no excuse.

If people know about disclaimers pointing to lines to clarify an ad, and refuse to look, or even know there's obviously more to the story, then they have no one to blame but themselves.

This mentality / way of thinking is something I equate to the moron in the cross walk, staring down a speeding car heading towards him at 60MPH, as the guy in the cross walk says "but the car has to stop, I have the right of way".. and then gets run over. While he may be in the right of way, he's still roadkill. I equate this theory to at least 80% of the people that post regularly on the site.

I would go on further, now, but at this point, there are too many people in the cross walk waiting to get hit so it's a waste of time.

"And, as for the ads.. read the fine print."

So, when I go and provide a QUOTE that you cannot refute, you then say it doesn't matter? The fine print with the ad does not prohibit or even mention *how much* you can use the service, only that YMMV with regard to speed. So why would it mean you can't use it 24/7? I maintain in all of this that if the companies would just *say* what they mean without all the vagueness of "Typical" this and "Reasonable" that, we wouldn't have these misunderstandings.
Please provide a cite that the TOS is part of the ad for advertising principles and requirements under law.

I'm not a lawyer, and can only provide what I understand as a consumer. However, under the ruling for the blockbuster case, the advertising legality is based on what the common (possibly lazy and stupid) consumer would understand from the ad. Not what a technical user or lawyer would get from the ad.

Read the fine print is fine, but a company cannot and should not be allowed to get away with fine print that is no where near the ad, not indicated that it is related to the ad and the user has to go out of his way to track down!

reply to funchords

Well how nice we have a self appointed expert here. Probably even self taught too. Probably could even become a self taught expert lawyer too and put a stop to Comcast and all other ISPs traffic shaping. We can now all rest assured that bit torrents are not servers because we have it straight from the mouth of the self appointed authority in the matter. Good thing ISPs are not bound by your authority. By the way since you are the authoritative expert and so certain of your claim, how about filling a class action lawsuit on behalf of all customers of ISPs who are traffic shaping in a manner that degrades bit torrents? You know, put your money where your mouth is.

So it would seem you agree that bit torrents are "distributed file hosting and substantially used by business to distribute product by leaching off of residential customers of ISPs rather than purchasing suitable service for themselves".

Efficiency and smart are not justification for breach of terms of service. Its been a few days, but wasn’t it mentioned in that CNET article, or another, that the RST packets did NOT occur between Comcast end points, but only between Comcast and non-Comcast end points? But even if not it would not matter as the argument of being efficient is irrelevant to the issue of breaching the terms of service. To bad you have such a hard time rebutting without the need to spin. Which by the way is why I am not going to respond directly to much of your inline tit for tat. I figure most people can discern the spin for themselves.

Apparently when some people become self exalted experts their extreme bias inhibits their ability to read.

I have lost count of how many of their claims are contradicted by the actual Comcast terms of services for residential customers, as well as my ISP and many other major ISPs. Un-experienced un-trainable monkeys like me do not have that many fingers and toes to count with. But being that they are experts they probably have spin calculators to make it all add up (1 spin + >= 0 more spins = no spin). But I certainly can not get their spin to reconcile with the actual terms of service, that is for sure.

Here are a few excerpts from Comcast's actual terms of service to wet your appetite.

Terms of Service
»www.comcast.net/terms/index.jsp

Subscriber Agreement
»www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber.jsp

7. USE OF SERVICES
You agree that the Services and the Comcast Equipment will be used only by you and the members of your immediate household living with you at the same address and only for personal, residential, non-commercial purposes, unless otherwise specifically authorized by us in writing.

b. Prohibited Uses of HSI. You agree not to use HSI for operation as an Internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, "Web hosting" or other similar applications, ...

Acceptable Use Policy
»www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp

PROHIBITED USES AND ACTIVITIES
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:

xiv. run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;