The New York Times reports that Comcast is blocking file sharing by some of its subscribers. No wonder the proponents of net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit ISPs from discriminating against certain types of content, are very upset and want Congress to act now to preserve net neutrality. The New York Times reports that Comcast is blocking file sharing by some of its subscribers. No wonder the proponents of net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit ISPs from discriminating against certain types of content, are very upset and want Congress to act now to preserve net neutrality.
The NYT says:
Click here to read the entire NYT article.
There are many legitimate uses for Bittorrent and other file sharing networks. For example, when I was taking Buddhist meditation classes at the Rigpa Center in Amsterdam, we would get (via Bittorent) video teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche, the Rigpa Center’s founder and spiritual leader. He travels often to various locations and gives teachings at retreats so it was very important for his students around the world to be able to view the teachings. Bittorent was the easiest way to distribute the teachings.
We have known for years that ISPs do some kind of traffic shaping to manage their bandwidth, but if people had more bandwidth instead of less, we would not run into this problem. How about 50 Mbps+ symmetrical? This is an infrastructure issue that is closely interwoven with competition issues and unless we face it head-on, it will only get worse.
UPDATE: Comcast is not “blocking” traffic, it’s degrading applications, which is just as bad. Harold Feld says:
“For purposes of this discussion, let us assume everyone here tells the literal truth. First, “Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.” Very true. What Comcast is doing here is far more subtle. It is discouraging use of BitTorrent by degrading the reliability of the application, not by out and out blocking. This certainly will impact the load of traffic on Comcast’s systems although, as we shall see, the impact is not limited to Comcast’s systems or Comcast’s customers. At the same time, we will also note that the AP used the King James version of the Bible. This file is (a) relatively small as things go (only about 4 MB) and, (b) clearly in the public domain. So this is clearly an effort to degrade BitTorrent use to reduce overall BitTorrent traffic, regardless of the size of the file or the content.”
Read the rest of Harold’s excellent post here.
Some ISP’s have been doing “port filtering” for many years. One “good” example is blocking outgoing connections on port 25 (SMTP). This forces most dynamic IP users (dial-up and most DSL) to go through the ISP’s email servers rather and stops them from sending email directly out to the Internet themselves. This greatly reduces outgoing spam, and most people think that this is “good”.
What Comcast is doing is targeting certain high-volume applications. A lot of copyrighted multimedia content gets passed via these applications but there is no clear evidence as to what degree the illegal copying played a role in Comcast’s decision as to which applications to target. If Comcast could demonstrate that the criteria it used was strictly based on data volume, would that satisfy (for lack of a better phrase) the conspiracy theorists? It is unfortunate that in a competitive telecomm environment, Comcast may be disinclined to divulge its exact practices by treated them as trade secrets. Perhaps what is needed are new regulations that require it to divulge the list of applications it is slowing or blocking, along with some evidence as to the previous traffic share that those applications were consuming.
Comcast censors the Bible (post by David Isenberg: http://isen.com/blog/2007/10/comcast-censors-bible.html)
It’s time to go beyond net neutrality, time for structural separation: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2621
One thing that is never mentioned is Comcast also blocks customers access to NewsGroups servers. I have been unable to access my GigaNews server since April. Their email and online tech support does nothing except lie, play ignorant and do everything except addressing the complaint.
I recently subscribed to another ISP. First thing I did was try to access my GigaNews account. Worked great like it did using Comcast until April 07.
My understanding is Comcast blocks the top 20% of high usage users. They won’t tell the customer. They simply block them and claim total ignorance.
It’s not only PtP, but also NewsGroups users.
I have read they won’t even tell what the limit is since it is a big secret. Talk about Catch 22!