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FCC Complaint Filed Over Comcast P2P Blocking
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.""
This has less to do with Net neutrality and more to do with not spoofing (fraudulent) packets. You can still shape traffic, you just can't fraudulently send packets to people.
There are many more things then illegal files that this is in use for in particular World of Warcraft Patching among some others. I Can only imagine more Businesses starting to use this to deliver their content as fast as possible.
It's actually a pretty common thing within some networks to create some classes of TCP traffic and cause them to drop a packet. It causes the TCP session window to shrink by half, so now each side has to tighten up their acknowledgment window. It's called Random Early Detection. TCP is very resilient traffic, so this has very little impact on most networks (although I'd be very careful about using it within an ISP network).
However, this seems to be clearly stepping above that, and performing what is essentially source address spoofing, regardless of the whether or not there is congestion on the network. I don't know if you can really classify this as a QoS technique.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
They aren't a common carrier now, so unfortunately there's nothing to revoke. Telcos have this classification but ISPs do not.
In fines not damages.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Bit Torrent is not on shaky legal ground. Bit Torrent is not like napster, morpheus, kazaa, or limewire. It's not a program/network package. Bit Torrent is more like a protocol. The Bit Torrent method has no more affiliation with (or responsibility to) p2p sites offering links to illegal torrents than HTTP or IP does.
This is like saying public highways are on shaky legal ground because people smuggle drugs across them.
There are many ISPs that block BitTorrent:
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
It seems odd to pick on only one of them.
Agreed. It isn't okay if they're selling me an "UNLIMITED" plan then decide what the hell I can do with it. I've said for years that all these "content access providers" (sorry, they're not INTERNET service providers anymore) just need to stop with their crap. Where is the ISP that allows me unfettered, high speed access to the internet.
They made a mistake and offered the plan knowing in the day the typical usage of users. When high bandwidth P-P invaded the network and high bandwidth continued after the user left the chair in front of the keyboard, the drain on resources was like having unlimited (un metered) water to the house (I have had that) and decided to never shut off any water in the house at any time. As a bonus, I decide to add a fountain in the pond in the yard and leave it run. If we all did that with our unlimited plans, there would quickly be a shortage and the supplier will be by soon looking to plug a few leaks.
The truth shall set you free!
They aren't just hitting bit-torrent, anything that has a lot of upload traffic gets reset; even FTP can be flaky during prime-time because it does a lot of handshaking. The wife's board games from pogo.com are even getting hit in the cross fire so we're not only not getting the bandwidth we're paying for, they are interfering with sites we have paid subscriptions with!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
ISPs are not common carriers.
Wrong.
Common carrier status does NOT require explicit legislation. It is a creature of common law. Explicit legislation may codify the details of the obligations and immunities of a PARTICULAR type of common carrier, rather than leaving it to judges and precedent. But it isn't necessary to create such a state.
An ISP may be or may not be a common carrier, depending on its behavior:
- If it accepts all comers on equal terms it's a common carrier. Making no choices it is not obligated to make choices or responsible for those choices. In particular: its customers are responsible for the legality and results of their actions while using the service.
- If it picks and choses, it's not a common carrier. By making choices it becomes responsible for the choices and acquires an obligation to continue to make choices. In particular: If its customers use its service to commit a crime or a tort, the carrier becomes an accessory and/or co-conspirator.
(In Comcast's case there's the additional element of fraud: They could easily have gotten away with traffic shaping. But forging RST packets to disrupt undesired connections is not part of the the protocol specifications that define "internet service".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm debugging a connection right now, and it appears that Comcast is blocking inbound IPSec packets (and NAT-T over UDP)...
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