Comcast subscribers should sue Comcast
This is an ideal opportunity for those attorneys who make gobs of money by seizing opportunities to file class action suits. When Comcast prices their service and markets it to the public, the pricing is based on the bandwidth that is made available. There is no suggestion of any limitation or restriction that is tied to the how the bandwidth is used. Level 3 will have to pass the cost on to Netflix, who will have to pass in on to the consumer. The consumer has to pay. This is the point that should be emphasized. It is the consumer, not Level 3 or Netflix, who is being forced to pay a surcharge for the bandwidth, that they are already paying for, because they want to use it to download movies from Netflix. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Comcast and their lawyers will try to get away with this, but they are pulling a fast one. It is wrong, and if they are allowed to get away with it, it is a terrible precedent. I do not think that the FCC or congress will allow them to get away with this, but of course it is foolish to have much confidence in what the FCC or congress will or will not do. Consumers/subscribers need to realize that they are the ones that Comcast is screwing over, never mind that the impetus is fending off competition from Netflix. I watched a couple of so-called telecommunications legal experts on MSNBC (or was it CNBC?) trying to say that this makes sense because Comcast sells bandwidth and this represents a use of bandwidth. But these bozos are as wrong as they could possibly be. Didn't they stop to think that the consumer is paying for bandwidth with no conditions on how it is used? Didn't they stop to think that the logical extension of their argument is that local Internet providers will be permitted to charge a fee to any person or company who transmits data per request to any remote user who is not using the same Internet provider? This is ludicrous. If you connect to the Internet via, say, Qwest, and someone located in a different part of the country and using Comcast requests you to send them a bunch of data, and you comply thinking that your connection and bandwidth is paid for through your provider and that it is the recipient's responsibility to pay Comcast, but then Comcast says that because you are the source of the data that you have to pay them as well, does this make sense to you? Of course it does not make sense. It does not make a whit of sense. It is preposterous. Let us hope that the FCC and/or congress has sense enough to realize the implications of what Comcast is trying to get away with here and puts an end to this nonsense before the idea gets any further than it already has.