FCC Caves In To Comcast

The head-honcho of the FCC, Kevin Martin, said Tuesday " there's no need for new regulation of the Internet," saying his agency has all the authority it needs to prevent discrimination by internet service providers. And yet his agency has done nothing to stop the throttling of bandwidth by the biggest ISP, Comcast.

As a former Comcast customer I can attest to the fact that Comcast not only throttled my service but admitted during a telephone call that they had been reading my emails and monitoring (viewing) my email attachments. The Comcast jerk who gloated when he told me this also said he had every right to do so under the Patriot Act and that it was normal practice for Comcast to monitor all email distributed over the Comcast system.

With this latest encouragement from the FCC, Comcast is now empowered to go even further. Forget a password and have it emailed to you? A Comcast employee will read and probably note it to gain access to your private web site accounts such as PayPal, your Bank, anything you pay a credit card with. Comcast is going to make sure you have NO privacy whatsoever if you use their service.

If you use Comcast for more than just Internet access then you'll pay even more for less broadband speed. Customers who have purchased Comcast's VOIP service find that if they use the VOIP to make a telephone call their internet and/or cable services comes to a crawl. Web pages won't load and television shows or movies halt in digital patterns on the screen. Worse yet, the calls are dropped when the caller extends his calls for longer then several minutes. The Comcast customer who buys Comcast's cable Internet service, VOIP and cable TV gets the same amount of broadband access as a Comcast customer buying only the Internet Service. In short, the Comcast customer who buys more services pays more and gets far less.

And the FCC says that is okay even though the FCC has conducted two hearings on "network management" following admissions by Comcast Corp. that it sometimes delayed file-sharing traffic for subscribers as a way to keep Web traffic flowing. If you are paying $100 a month for fast "unlimited" internet broadband service from Comcast you aren't getting it and you won't get it because the FCC says it is okay for Comcast to throttle or disrupt your access when you've exceeded your "unlimited" limit. How asinine is that?

Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, described the picture painted by pro- net neutrality commenters as "a complete fantasy."

I'm here today to tell you Kyle McSlarrow is lying. As a customer with Comcast for three years paying an average fee of over $100 a month for broadband cable internet access, Comcast admitted to throttling and disrupting my service repeatedly because I refused to accept their claim that my "unlimited" access was subject to what they decided was unlimited. Comcast read my emails, watched as I passed along my credit card information, my bank information, my passwords and login information on everything I did while connected to their service. And they are doing the very same thing to you whether you believe it or not.

McSlarrow said of the tens of millions of people who use the Internet every day, "no one is being blocked" and if they were, they could go to another competitor.

As a former Comcast customer I did just that - I moved to Comcast's biggest competitor and I couldn't be happier. I suggest you do the same today.