FCC To Comcast: Pwned!

Poor old Comcast. All they want to do is manage the traffic on their network so that people that only use the internet for email don't have interference from their other customers who download stuff. Never mind that they all pay the same amount and their user agreements don't allow for active blocking of traffic, that's trivial. They do this to protect the people, not punish them!

Well, we know there is a group of consumers who weren't buying the story and have decided to file a lawsuit. Now it seems that the FCC has finally perked its ears to this situation and is launching an official investigation into the matter. It just seems that people want to kick Comcast while they're down, or rather, they want to kick Comcast because their bandwidth is down...

I'll admit, this gives me a tad bit of satisfaction as I'm having other service problems with Comcast at the moment, so excuse the bias, but this serves them right. Consumer advocacy groups have asked that Comcast be fined $195,000 per affected customer, and with 9.1 million customers, that could hurt more than a few retirement funds. While I doubt that they will be fined that heavily, it's just nice to know that some justice may be served. Of course, the ultimate justice is for consumers to switch to a competing service, but this is nice too.

The other part of this is that whatever the FCC rules could stand to set a strong precedent in the field. With all the dirty politicians in Washington, I just can't imagine they would rule in favor of Comcast... there's just too much gay porn available on BitTorrent and we still have a ton of Republicans in D.C. hiding in the closet.

[via: The Download Squad]