The Web’s Wannabe Gatekeepers: Comcast, Now Cox
May 15th, 2008 by tkarrComcast is not alone on the list of wannabe gatekeepers. Cox Communications has joined the ranks with news today that it is degrading and blocking customer file-sharing in the same deceptive manner.
The news follows an exhaustive study by the Max Planck Institute, which tested the connections of 8,175 Internet users around the world. According to Institute spokesperson Krishna Gummadi, they found conclusive evidence that Cox blocked file-sharing connections alongside Comcast in the United States.
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Robb Topolski, the former Intel engineer who first revealed Comcast’s blocking last year, told the Associated Press that the Institute’s investigation was the most authoritative study so far of this type of Web discrimination.
These results confirm what’s already become obvious to many Internet users around the country: Cable companies simply can’t be trusted to protect the free-flowing Internet.
Despite widespread public outrage and an ongoing investigation of Comcast, these companies persist in thinking that Internet content can be shaped and manipulated like their legacy video services.
“This harmful practice appears to be spreading through the marketplace,” Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott said.
Indeed, as a high-speed Internet connection becomes our portal to all things media – from email to user generated video and music – the old media regime can resist the temptation to get in the way.
These corporations have built their empires upon controlling the ebb and flow of information in America. The Internet, however, is about free choice and user-generated content – all being shared without the need of content gatekeepers or middlemen.
They want to be more than just a window to the Web, and have proposed a closed scheme of Internet fees and filters that allows them final say over which ideas make it to the top of the heap.
These moves by Comcast and Cox are further evidence that the threat to Internet freedom is real; the need for baseline user protections more urgent than ever.
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UPDATE: Read Harold Feld’s latest post at WetMachine for more on the anticipated spin.
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UPDATE 2:And at the Wall Street Journal, beware the “wrath.”
May 16th, 2008 at 2:13 am
[…] The Web’s Wannabe Gatekeepers: Comcast, Now Cox […]
May 16th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Nothing that Cox has done is any “proof” that any “threat to Internet freedom is real.” Quite the contrary, in fact. Cox is throttling P2P, as any responsible Internet provider must do, to ensure that legitimate and important traffic — including political free speech — gets through.
It is astonishingly wrongheaded to claim that throttling or blocking P2P, which is primarily used for piracy and occasionally used for legal “canned” material such as movies, is in any way an infringement of free speech. In fact, if ISPs do NOT block P2P, it will not only harm free speech but prevent rural broadband deployment and put competitive Internet providers out of business, leaving you with at most the choice of getting Internet from the cable company or the telephone company.
Both the Markey bill (HR 5353) and the Conyers bill (HR 5994) are harmful to Internet freedom and anti-consumer. And so are the efforts of the so-called “network neutrality” crusaders, who in fact are lobbying on behalf of corporations (such as Google and Vuze).
May 16th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
So it’s up to Cox and Comcast to decide what’s “legitimate and important traffic” and what’s not?
Scary.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
It certainly shouldn’t be up to pirates and bandwidth hogs… who are shoving other users’ traffic to the back of the queue. Cox and Comcast are making sure they can’t do that.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Essentially, it’s about a better definition of “reasonable” network management. We are saying ISPs can manage traffic in a reasonable manner as long as they are transparent about it and don’t discriminate based on ownership, source or destination of content. What Comcast, and apparently Cox, are doing is not only deceptive, it crosses the discrimination line. Hopefully the FCC will make that clear when they rule against Comcast.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
No “discrimination” based on “ownership,” eh? That would mean we couldn’t block spammers. We also couldn’t provide Internet to a school, because another law (COPA) says that we must filter the sites the kids can see — according to the source — and this bill would say that we couldn’t.
What’s more, all of the bills your organization is supporting go much further than that. One prohibits tiered pricing. One mandates that every user be able to operate a server. (That would send costs through the roof. the static, public IP address by itself would cost $10 more per month, and that’s before the higher bandwidth charges.) At least two of them would prevent ISPs from throttling or blocking P2P — requiring them to raise prices AND cut bandwidth allocations. All are bad for consumers.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:35 am
Brett, Discrimination happens based on ownership, but it’s important who does that discrimination. I can choose to discriminate against what comes to me. I can also choose to discriminate against what comes to my child in school. I can discriminate against what affects my life.
However, when someone else starts making that choice for me, decides what is good for me and what is bad for me, and basically does not listen to me, I get pissed off. I get even more pissed off when it does that to make a few billion more.
And I really don’t understand how blocking P2P helping consumers? Another case of I don’t know what’s good for me and let the big giants decide for me? I am a consumer as well. And I am not lobbying on behalf on any corporation.
My name is not important and I am the AngryIndian
http://www.AngryIndian.com
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
“AngryIndian,” no one is making a choice as to what content is good or bad for you. However, a network operator must police BEHAVIOR on the network to make sure that no user is hogging bandwidth or using abusive software. Which is what P2P software is. It’s designed to abuse the network by seizing priority over other traffic and transferring the content provider’s costs to the ISP (by setting up a server on the ISP’s network without permission or compensation). If carriage of P2P traffic were mandated, the cost of a consumer Internet connection would likely triple, and this WOULD be very bad for consumers. So, ISPs are doing you a favor by blocking or throttling P2P. And they’re not threatening free speech one bit, because anything that can be delivered via P2P can also be delivered in a legitimate and non-abusive way. You should be supporting them, not condemning them.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Brett, you are way off base.
First of all I would say the network operator needs to manage their network, not police.
That aside, consumers sign up for internet service and are quoted a specific amount of bandwidth. Yes it is usually considered maximum bandwidth but that is problem number #1. The bandwidth providers are allowed to market these numbers in commercials as if that is the bandwidth users will get.
When you sign up for a dedicated server, these companies will quote you max burstable bandwidth and regular total bandwidth.
Burstable is often around 10mpbs while regular max is 1.5mpbs.
This makes it clear and transparent exactly the amount of bandwidth the user has.
Why not have the same transparency by ISP providers?
I don’t think anyone here would have qualms with P2P traffic being throttled down to regular max bandwidth is the rest of the users on the network are qually using as much bandwidth and the ISP is merely dividing up bandwidth equally amongst its users.
The articles on what Comcast and Cox are doing doesn’t imply that is the case. It suggests they are specifically targeting P2P traffic above all others.
Lastly, consumers pay ISPs for the bandwidth they use. The notion, the idea, that content providers should pay ISPs as well is flat out total bullshit and it makes me think you work for the industry pushing to squeeze money from content providers.
The industry isn’t doing that to help manage their network, they are doing that because the industry wants to be the sole provider to the end user of movies, tv, videos on demand, VoIP telephone, music, etc. The industry recognizes that cableTV as we know it is doomed. Why pay $65 a month for cableTV when you can watch the shows over the internet for free paid for by ads in the shows?
There is a reason Time Warner’s CEO said he didn’t see a need for 1Gbe to each home. Because he sees that it would be the end of their business model as a content provider and they would be merely left as a bandwidth provider, a less lucrative industry.
The industry could roll out 1Gbe to the home now if they truly wanted to and it wouldn’t cost a fortune either.
May 25th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
“rfrancis”, you have an interesting domain name. Are you a fan of Nietzsche?
In any event, network operators really do need to police their networks to avoid abuse. There is no limit to the number of attempts at theft of service, break-ins, and potential exploits that an ISP may experience. We get dozens per week. We see port scans, ping scans, worms, attempted pop-up spam, fraudulent pop-ups that install Trojan horse programs masquerading as virus checkers. We do our best to block them, for the sake of our users.
We’ve been doing this for 15 years, and we’ve seen it all. (We were among the first to analyze and block the Melissa worm.) BitTorrent and other P2P programs are only the latest of these exploits. P2Pis particularly nasty, though, its purpose is to take ISPs’ services, without payment, for the benefit of greedy corporations like Vuze which do not want to pay for their Internet bandwidth. It also seeks to exploit our network by seizing priority over traffic that needs “real time” handling, such as VoIP.
You write, “consumers sign up for internet service and are quoted a specific amount of bandwidth. Yes it is usually considered maximum bandwidth but that is problem number #1. The bandwidth providers are allowed to market these numbers in commercials as if that is the bandwidth users will get.”
Unfortunately, that’s a reality of the business and of marketing. Every new customer who calls us for service asks, “How fast is it? Give me a number.” And they want just one number that tells it all… which, of course, is impossible because Internet connections have many parameters. Think of it as the “megahertz” problem.” Remember when Intel changed the entire design of its microprocessors so that the clock speed in megahertz was higher, even though the performance was worse than that of an AMD Athlon clocked at a slower speed? Believe it or not, this tactic not only worked but saved Intel’s bacon. AMD would be #1 in the microprocessor industry now if Intel hadn’t resorted to this tactic.
Our ISP gives real performance numbers — minimums, not maximums. And we pay for it, dearly, because customers compare those minimum numbers to the cable company’s unachievable maximums. But we think it’s important to be honest and to provide a number that the consumer can actually measure. If our experience is any guide, it would cost the cable and telephone companies billions if they were as honest as we were.
However, in order to provide those minimums, we must set constraints on usage. Some ISPs pay as much as $300 per megabit per second per month for bandwidth. Ours pays around $100 per Mbps per month. We can’t resell it below cost, and that means that we must contractually forbid P2P and then enforce that prohibition. (The minimum speed numbers only apply to uses which fall within our acceptable use policy, by the way. We clearly state that the minimum speed does not apply to illegitimate uses such as BitTorrent. But you will get the minimum speed for legitimate uses.) For more on this very pro-consumer approach to disclosure and network management, see my testimony before the FCC at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html.
As for content providers paying ISPs: Why shouldn’t they be allowed to pay for accelerated service. This is the same thing as, for example, a small bookseller competing with Amazon (and Barnes and Noble’s “big box” stores) by offering to upgrade your order to “2nd Day Air” shipping for free, while Amazon uses parcel post or the even slower “media mail.” Doing so doesn’t slow their competitors’ parcels down, but it does speed their own up.
In the same way, by supplementing the money paid by the ISP’s users with some money of its own, a content provider can pay the ISP to devote additional resources to delivering the content faster. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, but it is a win all around. The content provider — perhaps a small one that needs exposure — gets faster delivery. The ISP has a service to market. And the customer gets a better experience. What’s wrong with that?
As for your claim that ISPs are slowing down competitive media: there are two flaws in your argument above. Firstly, you’re assuming that all ISPs are telephone and cable companies. Ours is not. We deliver Internet and only Internet. We have no incentive to slow down content competes with our own, because we’re not IN the content business. Period. Secondly, there has been only one documented instance — ever — of one small ISP slowing down a competitive service, and that was quickly stopped. Comcast, Cox, etc. have never done it or threatened to do it.
As for 1 Gbps to the home: We’d love to roll it out. But the users couldn’t afford the bandwidth, even if we made no profit on it. Instead of fighting a straw man that does not exist, Free Press (AKA “Save the Internet”) should be fighting consolidation in the market for Internet backbone transit, which has stopped the drop in bandwidth prices and in fact is causing them to rise in many locations, including ours. But instead, it’s attacking a straw man.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:07 am
By the way, the video at the top of this page is an unauthorized derivative work which infringes Disney’s copyright on its famous “Schoolhouse Rock” series. It is interesting that Free Press is lobbying so hard to impose laws on others while it feels free to flout the law itself!
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:15 am
Brett, I’ve searched and you seem to be all over the Internet trumpting on Comcast’s behalf. Are you the same “Brett Glass” that has said not being able to cut users off will make it impossible to manage networks? I’m sorry, but there are plenty of networks able to manage their network just fine. In fact, at peek usage times it would be perfectly legitimate to lower everyone’s speed that’s trying to use the service so they can fit through the pipe only while the congestion was an issue (just like Los Angeles has started using technology to set variable speed limits to ensure the best flow possible for traffic, and when congestion isn’t a problem the variable limit goes back up to normal). _That_ is GOOD network management. The schemes setup by companies like Comcast are only plans to ensure they control the future of internet services as more and more devices go online.