Public interest groups aren’t fully satisfied with Comcast’s blog post explaining...
Public interest groups aren’t fully satisfied with Comcast’s blog post explaining that the cable operator doesn’t prioritize Internet Protocol video streams sent to Xbox videogame consoles that are exempted from broadband subscribers’ data caps (CD May 16 p3). But Free…
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Press and Public Knowledge, whose officials told us about their critiques, didn’t say they plan to file a complaint with the FCC or Justice Department alleging the company violates the commission’s net neutrality rules or mandates in the agencies’ orders allowing Comcast to buy control of NBCUniversal. “Comcast may just be labeling traffic in ways that could be used to prioritize it later on,” Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said. Comcast saying that the VOD and other content sent to Xbox 360s go over its own IP network, and not the public Internet, “doesn’t end the debate,” he said. The operator’s citation of Title VI of the Communications Act, which applies to cable programming, still means Comcast’s own “video gets special treatment while lower priced offerings count against customers’ monthly data caps,” Wood said. “Comcast says that the Xbox ‘essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service’ -- yet customers can’t receive this benefit unless they also have a Comcast broadband subscription.” That makes technical sense since the console lacks the port needed to plug into a cable-TV connector and a CableCARD and instead uses an ethernet or Wi-Fi connection, he said. “But how can anyone claim that this is just a cable TV service if I have to pay for a Comcast cable TV subscription and a Comcast broadband subscription to get it?” For Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld, it’s “de ja vu all over again.” He compared Comcast’s explanations for its managed service to how the company initially denied blocking BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic several years ago. Comcast acknowledged the P2P blocking “only after” the commission sought an explanation, he said. “The advantage of having the FCC and the DOJ address these concerns in the Comcast/NBCU merger conditions was that we would not have to guess,” Feld said. “This is a case that cries out for the FCC and the DOJ to conduct a serious investigation that can resolve these very serious allegations, rather than simply accept Comcast’s explanation."