Owen, As I understand the ruling, the court decided that the FCC had screwed up by making their own rules limiting their purview over broadband. Thus it was internally inconsistent for the FCC to declare broadband a 'lightly regulated' medium, and then try to regulate it in a heavy-handed way. Likely, the FCC will fix the problem simply by declaring broadband to be a 'heavily regulated' medium, or otherwise fixing their internal rules to give them more explicit power in these sorts of matters.
I'm not sure that Comcast's rules made any sense to begin with. Why target Bit-torrent? Probably just in part to control bandwidth, but mostly to be able to say "I tried" if anyone ever tries to sue them as accessories to digital theft. I'd appreciate knowing if anyone else had a different read on what happened, Eric On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 01:30 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Has anyone made sense of the ruling in Comcast's favor? > >As I understand, they cut down bit-torrent due to bandwidth usage. >But that makes no sense, it is not a real-time protocol. If they >wanted to manage bandwidth, they would presumably go after Hulu, >Amazon, Netflix etc. > >I'm not even sure how successful a bit-torrent block would be -- each >person chooses their own port address. There is a default port but >all are warned to change it for security reasons. And there are no >bit-torrent servers, but lots of peers sharing. Any file you download >are fragments from several peers. > > -- Owen > > > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
