Dear Dr. Wheeler:
I am a student at California Polytechnical State University. I strongly believe that internet service providers should be classified as common carriers.
There is not any measurable difference between the internet service provided by Comcast in one town and Time Warner in the next, other than speed and cost.
On a sidenote, because Netflix is cited so much as the “top consumer of bandwidth” during peak periods, I feel that you should ask the providers during the next session where they complain about it whether or not they have tried cooperating with Netflix to get more peering boxes installed. (These peering boxes serve the video from inside the Provider’s network, meaning less nodes/routers are affected by the bandwidth.)
Because the different providers have no real difference between them (and when they do try to be different in their service, they usually do illegal or horribly badly done things - see [1] and [2]), I see no reason for them not to be classified as common carriers like telephone companies.
Please, I urge you to classify broadband and wireless internet service providers as common carriers. This is something whose time has come, and is truly in the best interest of the consumer.
Sincerely,
Kane York
Student, California Polytechnical State University, San Luis Obispo
[1] https://gist.github.com/ryankearney/4146814 - Comcast injecting badly written JavaScript code into every unencrypted webpage when you near your data cap, which breaks some websites and doesn’t even work, instead generating a web request every 5 seconds to the wrong website – bringing you even closer to your data cap! Reader comment: “it causes every page served on your system to pop an AJAX request to the wrong URL every 5 seconds, forever.”
[2] http://zmhenkel.blogspot.com/2013/03/isp-advertisement-injection-cma.html - This ISP was adding a small Javascript tag on the bottom of every unencrypted webpage, which replaced all advertisements with their own and added advertisements to pages that did not have them, with the proceeds going to that ISP. I note that this “was ruled illegal because they’d be artificially increasing the size of whatever website you were viewing and then charging you to download the ads that they injected.”
I also posted this here: http://pastebin.com/qJeUvu89
