Comcast Continues to Blow Smoke
April 1st, 2008 by tkarrLast Friday, Comcast’s Executive Vice President David Cohen sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin filled, as usual, with lies and half-truths.
Cohen’s letter was in response to Chairman Martin’s statement on the recent Comcast and BitTorrent, Inc. agreement to end the cable company’s blocking of BitTorrent’s file-sharing applications. The agreement itself hasn’t been made public and its details are unclear.
Guest Post by Marvin Ammori, Free Press General Counsel |
For months, Comcast had been deceptively blocking the popular Internet protocol — used to transfer large files including full-length videos — in part because it competed with the cable company’s video-on-demand and television offerings.
When word first emerged last year that Comcast was blocking, the company lied to the press and the public, saying it didn’t interfere with BitTorrent. But several independent tests confirmed the opposite to be true.
This revelation uncorked another round of lies from the cable giant, which called such blocking of user applications a “reasonable” way to “manage” online traffic. Never mind that millions of Americans use file-sharing applications for legal purposes.
On behalf of these Internet users, Free Press and other organizations filed a petition asking the FCC to look into this matter and protect a free flowing Internet. After six months under intense scrutiny from the press, the public, and the FCC, on last Thursday, Comcast blinked and made a deal with only one company using the BitTorrent protocol — a company called BitTorrent, actually — and then tried to claim that everyone else should forgive Comcast’s blatant and secret assaults on the Internet.
In a statement last Thursday, Chairman Martin said he was relieved to hear that Comcast had “agreed that it is not a reasonable network management practice to arbitrarily block certain applications on its network.”
Martin’s statement, in turn, unleashed yet another blast of hot air from Comcast executives. David Cohen’s Friday letter contained at least three major lies, continuing Comcast’s trend of filing documents with a lie-to-word ratio of almost one-to-one.
Cohen (1) told Martin that the BitTorrent, Inc. deal received “overwhelmingly positive feedback,” (2) accused the Chairman of repeating “erroneous characterizations of Comcast’s network management practices,” (3) and Comcast suggested that BitTorrent, Inc. was sympathetic with Comcast’s blocking actions. Let’s take this apart:
1. Not So-Positive Feedback
The “feedback” was not quite “overwhelmingly positive”—except from one FCC Commissioner who is always overwhelmingly positive about whatever Comcast does (see here on ownership limits, here on broadcast carriage, and article quoted here on blocking Internet protocols). Free Press and other consumer groups, which had mobilized tens of thousands of people to write the FCC protesting Comcast’s actions, issued statements calling for a continued investigation. Public Knowledge called the agreement “irrelevant” for the FCC. The mainstream press and technology press continued to call for Comcast’s blocking to be scrutinized.
Other companies using the BitTorrent protocol, including Vuze and Miro, also urged the FCC to adopt industry-wide Net Neutrality rules and to continue the inquiry into Comcast’s blocking. Vuze’s blog and Miro’s press statement made it clear: one private deal between one network provider and one BitTorrent application company is no substitute for enforceable, industry-wide Net Neutrality principles.
2. Comcast Makes It’s Own ‘Erroneous Characterizations’
In his Friday letter, Cohen accuses the Chairman of making “unsupported and inaccurate assertions” that Comcast “arbitrarily block[s] certain applications on its network.” Then Comcast repeats its own unsupported and inaccurate assertions — that its network “management” is limited and doesn’t involve blocking.
Comcast has never proved its own “unsupported” assertions; they’ve just said, “Trust us, though we repeatedly lie to you and the public.” On the other hand, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Robb Topolski, and the Associated Press all “supported” their characterizations with precise tests.
Comcast, not the Chairman, is making unsupported and inaccurate assertions. At the FCC’s Feb. 26 Harvard hearing (where the only people clapping for Comcast’s David Cohen were paid to do so), Professor Tim Wu translated David Cohen wordy, legalistic characterization of Comcast’s actions. Wu translated, “Comcast is blocking BitTorrent, end of story.” MIT Professor and Internet guru David Reed made the same point.
3. BitTorrent’s CTO thinks Comcast Broke the Law
Finally, David Cohen states that Comcast engaged in “reasonable network management” and quotes (for apparent support) BitTorrent’s CTO Eric Klinker. In the press release announcing the deal, Klinker said he “understand[s]” why Comcast engaged in its actions. But the statement is unclear. Most Americans “understand” why Comcast engaged in its deceptive hack against file sharing — Comcast wanted to block its competition and didn’t think it would get caught. Nothing hard to understand about that.
Indeed Klinker testified before the FCC and clearly said that Comcast was not engaging in reasonable management and that its tactics harmed consumers and future innovation. He said, Comcast’s actions “transcend any definition of ‘reasonable’ and should cease immediately.”
Klinker said Comcast’s was “blocking” a “class of applications” and could “stamp out in its infancy the most promising technology to deliver a world of near-infinite consumer choice in media … well beyond the thousand-channel universe we strive for today.”
BitTorrent’s CTO has been consistent. The day after the agreement, he said, “network management should not include using forged reset flags to break individual BitTorrent connections,” which is exactly what Comcast was doing, and he made it clear that “the FCC should continue to investigate Comcast’s treatment of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications.”
Whether or not Comcast has “admitted” it was arbitrarily blocking BitTorrent, Comcast was. But it continues to lie to the FCC about it, by repeating its denials. Fortunately, the FCC will continue its investigation (see statements by Chairman Martin and Commissioners Copps and Adelstein) and hasn’t been fooled by Comcast’s most recent smoke and mirrors, though Comcast continues to blow smoke.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:47 am
It was right and necessary for Comcast to throttle P2P. Under current conditions, no ISP can survive and provide quality service without some form of P2P mitigation. BitTorrent is not being honest in that it will not admit that its software is primarily a vehicle for pirated music and video, or that its software is purposefully designed to seize priority over other applications, or that its primary use by the very few non-infringing content providers who use it is to shift their bandwidth costs from themselves to the user’s ISP. Comcast has had very klutzy PR, and has put forth the worst possible spokespeople and witnesses, but all of this is nonetheless true. And while regulation would only be a minor slap on the wrist to Comcast, it would kill small, rural, and independent ISPs. Such ISPs, not being politically powerful and being too involved in actually providing Internet to do politics, have not gotten a seat at the table at any of the FCC hearings, so the public has not heard that. But in fact prohibiting the throttling of P2P (or its prohibition by contract) would put these small operators out of business, leaving a duopoly. And Comcast, Time Warner, Bresnan, Verizon, SBC, and Qwest really would “own” the Internet; there would be no consumer choice left.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I think that it is even worst now. Last week Comcast started to block hosting competitors IP’s.
List of blocked IP’s
bluehost.com
godaddy.com
yahoo mail
google mail
Comcast promises to unblock IP’s if you file individual request, but in fact – does not take any action to keep its promise.
Mariya Shall