After days of silence, Comcast released a statement last night responding to the AP investigative report showing the company blocking or interfering with BitTorrent’s file-sharing traffic — and much more.

To recap, AP conducted its own testing to verify chatter in the blogosphere that Comcast was surreptitiously throttling the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent. Further testing by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed Comcast blocking Gnutella, another file-sharing network, and the business application Lotus Notes.

What Comcast is doing is inspecting the packets of information users send over BitTorrent and similar peer-to-peer protocols. When Comcast’s technology identifies a file being uploaded over BitTorrent, it intercepts and terminates the transmission by falsifying the TCP to look like one of the end users.

As Professor Susan Crawford explains: “It’s as if someone else that sounded like you got on the phone as you were talking to your mother and said, ‘We need to hang up right now.’ ”

Comcast’s behavior, which AP calls “the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider,” is what a world without Net Neutrality looks like.

Once again — following incidents of AT&T censoring Pearl Jam online and Verizon rejecting NARAL’s text messages — we see why these gatekeepers can’t be trusted.

Devil in the Details

Comcast claims it doesn’t block access to any Web sites or online applications. It claims its just trying to “manage the network” to provide a “good Internet experience” for its customers. Sounds innocuous enough. But the devil, as always, is in the details.

Detail #1: Comcast’s technology doesn’t target individual users — it targets an entire technological protocol. Comcast isn’t just cracking down on “bandwidth hogs.” Regardless of an individual user’s actual bandwidth consumption, she may be blocked simply for choosing to upload through a targeted application (BitTorrent, etc.). I would like to hear anyone argue this is a fair adoption of “network management” techniques. Such methods directly contradict the core principles of the open Internet.

Detail #2: Comcast’s technology falsely impersonates its customers. Even if Comcast has the right to manage its networks, does it have the right to impersonate its customers to achieve network control? Clearly Comcast engaged in such a deceitful practice to avoid customers noticing and complaining. Such behavior may very well fall within the type of unfair or deceptive trade practices regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Lawsuits are likely to follow.

What’s Comcast Doing?

Such secretive and misleading practices — at least when they’re exposed — are likely to be bad for business. So why did Comcast interfere in such an unsavory manner? The first answer is simple: They thought they could get away with it. After all Comcast’s filtering technology is highly complex and not always noticeable to end-users.

And what can you do if you find out that you’ve been blocked by Comcast? Switch to AT&T or Verizon and suffer with slow DSL speeds and their own draconian terms of service.

But I think there is a second, more insidious but logical explanation: Comcast is paving the way to stifle competition in video delivery services. The world’s largest cable television company, Comcast has a natural incentive to keep customers watching movies and television shows through their system, not the Internet.

BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as one of the most successful and efficient online platforms for the sharing of large files. Numerous content providers in Hollywood have contracted with BitTorrent to make available their programming online for download, including 20^th Century Fox, Lions Gate, MTV, Paramount, Spike and the CW. Comcast certainly foresees BitTorrent’s threat to its core business model and wants to stifle such nascent competition in its infancy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->