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Congressman Tells Comcast, Hands Off BitTorrent
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Oct 25, 2007 12:34 PM
from the but-we-won't-make-no-laws dept.
from the but-we-won't-make-no-laws dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Just a few months back, the Net Neutrality debate was all but dead. Luckily for fans of a free Internet, the telcos are their own worst enemies. Recent stories involving Verizon Wireless blocking pro-choice groups, AT&T censoring Pearl Jam's anti-war comments from a streaming concert, and most recently, Comcast finally admitting to using anti-BitTorrent filters. The Net Neutrality debate would appear to be alive and kicking, with Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) being the first politician to make a public statement sharply criticizing Comcast's actions."
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Firehose:Congressman to Comcast: Hands off BitTorrent! by Anonymous Coward
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FCC Complaint Filed Over Comcast P2P Blocking 178 comments
Enter Sandvine writes "A handful of consumer groups have filed a complaint with the FCC over Comcast's "delaying" some BitTorrent traffic. The complaint seeks fines of $195,000 for each Comcast subscriber affected by the traffic blocking as well as a permanent injunction barring the ISP from blocking P2P traffic. '"Comcast's defense is bogus," said Free Press policy director Ben Scott. "The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast's blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws.""
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FCC Considers Taking Action Against Comcast 71 comments
Presto Vivace writes "According to CNet the Federal Communications Commission is considering taking action against cable operator Comcast modifying peer-to-peer traffic, a subject we've discussed here in the past. 'It looks like Chairman Martin, and by extension the commission, sees Comcast as going beyond simply managing its network. But even if the FCC decides that Comcast has violated Net neutrality principles, it's unclear what the agency can actually do to Comcast. The principles are not agency regulation.'"
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Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagues (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast has politely reminded this wayward congressman that in America laws are paid for by bribes. Comcast then offered the congressman a "campaign contribution", silencing his dissent. The system works.
Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. We demand that our presidents' faces be "presidential," discriminating against those with "non-presidential" faces. Facial discrimination is the great unspoken tragedy that stalks this nation. Fight facism now!
Great start (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great start (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great start (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great start (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Interesting)
1286 K uploaded at a rate of 20KB/s. This is the first time in weeks I have seen upload speeds better than 0.0 KB/s and a transfered size larger than 0.1 KB. Since I am finally able to help spread Ubuntu, I'll let it run all day. Maybe I'll be able to upload more than I download for a change. Seeing any upload traffic after a completed download is highly unusual on Comcast lately.
Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Comcast seems to be fast (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
NN is preferential shaping based on the source of the data. QOS is preferential shaping based on the type of data.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Completely blocking an entire protocol isn't QoS, Qos is about giving priority to certain types of traffic that need lower latency or more bandwidth, an example would be VoIP which needs low latency to not become useless.
What Comcast has been doing is outright blocking an entire protocol, sort of like how some ISPs block their users' ability to use SMTP, mostly outbound but in some cases inbound as well. The difference being that there is a good reason to block outbound SMTP, it may be a PITA for those trying to run their own mail server but at least the reason isn't so much direct greed as it is to protect the network at large from zombie machines trying to spam the rest of the net...
/Mikael
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
They're actively resetting ANY TCP connection that involves uploading significant amounts of data for more than a few seconds.
There have been numerous reports of this killing Lotus Domino connections too, and I wouldn't be surprised if I found lots of complaints on the SmugMug forums about people being unable to upload pictures if they were on Comcast. (Same traffic patterns - lots of upload for a while.)
Still, anything that involves resetting/blocking connections is not QoS. I don't think people would care if BT were the "bottom of the barrel" and was superseded by any other traffic type - it would still be wicked fast at 3 AM. The problem here is that Comcast is actively killing connections regardless of what the actual status of the rest of the network is, instead of taking advantage of TCP's built in congestion control mechanisms to slow things down.
I worry that if done wrong, legislation will be passed that even forbids QoS, which will make things really bad for both users and ISPs. The legislation would have to have wording that QoS is OK as long as the "bottom of the barrel" protocols are able to use full bandwidth when no one else is using the network.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but your bits aren't as large as the next guy's so you'll have to compensate with a cool car.
Not Qos (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want to be able to have a conversation at all, we need to stop confusing QOS with fraud. QOS sets attributes in packets which are designed to establish priority. Fraud (in this case) means posing as the customer and sending a fake message, then lying about sending the fake message.
For example, if a telco decided to cut sampling rates on telephone calls from 8khz to 7.6khz for residential service to customers of other carriers, that would be quality of service (QOS). If, on the other hand, the carrier were to use their equipment to dial everyone who called you who was not a customer of the same carrier, spoofing your phone number on caller ID, and using a voice filter which made their voice sound enough like yours to be convincing, and telling them "Don't call me anymore. Stop. I don't want to hear from you for at least a week. Got it? Yeah, I mean it. Stop calling for a while. Don't take that tone with me. Just stop calling. Yes, this is me. Who else would I be? Now Stop Calling." And then told you that they would NEVER do such a thing. That would be fraud.
Since telcos are being trusted with our identities (phone numbers, IPs, etc), our privacy (which they'd never violate without a warrant, as we've seen), and the functioning, as generally intended and advertised, of the Internet, character means something in this context.
I hope this helps us get our terms in agreement, so that we can have an argument, or even a conversation, on NN.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it is not about throttling, it is about killing entirely. When every attempt to connect is killed, you are not delaying traffic, you are stopping it entirely. But that is only one issue on the table with Comcast and its anti-BitTorrent activities, and quite frankly, it is a minor issue compared to the other.
More important to me, and hopefully to everybody else, is that Comcast is killing BitTorrent traffic by spoofing the users, and not always its own users. They are pretending to be their customers and the people they connect with, whether or not the people they are connected with are Comcast customers, to send the reset packets.
I don't know about you, but quite frankly, having
With a massive company such as Comcast faking its identity, it is out-and-out mortifying.
Throttling would be one thing. Killing by falsifying oneself as the customers they represent is another entirely.
Too late for Comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
What *did* annoy me, after the decision was taken, was that my difficulties with ichat [apple.com] over the last few months seem to be similarly down to Comcast policies.
I use iChat a lot to keep in touch with my family (all of whom have Macs, and 4-way video-conferencing can be pretty cool). There's several thousand miles between us, so this is one of the few ways we can actually see each other without major travel.
Until a few months ago, it all worked great. Now, I get less than a minute of great picture, and then everything breaks up. I was putting it down to transatlantic bandwidth issues, but then I tried it from work, and (lo and behold) had no problems whatsoever.
I pay (not for long, now though, the T1 arrives in 2 weeks) for the most bandwidth Comcast offer, and I cannot believe I average even 1% of that bandwidth. To have them limit me when I *do* want to use it, as a deliberate *general* policy of theirs, is infuriating. All I can do is cancel the service, and hope others do too. Eventually, hopefully, they'll get the message. Not everyone can cancel due to the monopoly they hold in some areas, but perhaps enough can to make a difference.
Now a T1 used to be a lot of bandwidth, but it's not so much any more (1.5Mbit/sec is pretty poor by advertised-bandwidth standards). I'm willing to trade off the small time-periods I actually can use that advertised bandwidth for the reliability of always having the smaller amount - it may not work for everyone, but it works for me
And so, Comcast lose another ~$200/month. Hopefully part of a trend, because won't anyone think of the network ? [grin]
Simon.
Re:Too late for Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
What really annoys me is that my tax dollars are used to provide these "utilities" with a limited sanctioned monopoly for the supposed public good, yet they don't offer services that address the whole public. If you really only intend your $65/mo service to be for grandmothers who use the account for email and checking up on their local church and the occasional amazon service, then offer a more expensive account for people who want heavy use and connect to work via VPN, back stuff up to remote servers, connect to colo hosted systems, use bit-torrent, watch lots of streaming videos, etc.
And for people who want to know "how in the hell do you use so much bandwidth?! 30gb should be more than enough!". Well, just downloading a few popular podcasts will do it. Especially now that they're HD quality. Diggnation, Crankygeeks, DL.TV, Totally Rad Show and a couple others downloaded every week at an average of almost 500mb each comes out to about 12gb per month right there. And that's if you aren't acquiring them via bit torrent where you'd have some overhead as well as at least 6gb to 12gb in upward bandwidth. So right there, you're at 24gb. Just to keep up with half a dozen weekly podcasts.
Throw in a couple people at your address listening to a lot of streaming radio. Watching streaming movies and news. Downloading five to ten gigs of demos on Xbox Live and Play Station Network. Perhaps connecting to your office with VPN and VNC to use your desktop. That's quite a lot of bandwidth. For completely legitimate purposes. And we haven't even touched things like using remote backup services that you can find online or downloading linux ISOs or the other streaming services like Vongo, Netflix and Amazon Unboxed.
Isn't it strange... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple soulation (Score:5, Interesting)
If Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or anyone else blocks any content for any reason, they are (from that point on) legally liable for all remaining content. This is because the have made an effort to control the content crossing there service and by default must agree that all remaining content is acceptable.
Then remind there legal department that it means "If you keep it up, we will hold you responsible for all the remaining content including but not limited to all the child porn, child predators, etc."
In other words, they have violated the common carrier clause and thus are not protected from prosecution!
Where is a lawyer when you need one?
Re:Simple soulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats to the Congressman (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God. There is an alarming trend among those who want to see a "neutral net" (a sentiment I agree with) to have "Dr. Government" fix it all. this is a slippery slope in plain sight; the idea of trusting the government to keep the net neutral doesn't appeal to me any more than having Comcast do it. What happens when the next elections come, and a new party/interest is in power? What happens when X lobby group petitions to sway the government's control of the network?
Fortunately, we have this convenient mechanism called the free market, where an outcry of foul play means an increased demand for competition. I realize this doesn't mean overnight those in Comcast-only zones are given an alternative, but over time, it is possible.
Now, when it comes to the infrastructure, the actual physical cables, etc., there's some room for talk as to whether the Government can have some limited intervention there, because we're dealing with interstate business and infrasturcture... but that's another story.
Re:Congrats to the Congressman (Score:5, Insightful)
This "hands off" talk assumes there is a free market already. There isn't, and the market will continue to devolve into an oligopoly until the government does something about it.
Re:Nice glasses (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice glasses (Score:5, Informative)