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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.""
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If the FCC takes effective action on this complaint, then they are effectively mandating net neutrality as part of their remit, so no law would be needed.
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Comcast getting fined is the kind of thing that needs to happen. Normally I'm against FCC fines, Howard Stern gets fined for saying the same thing Oprah does. Here, like Oprah I doubt the FCC will pursue this.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Now, with that said, there is one option that could be taken now that Net Neutrality has been brought into this.
I see from the PDF that the people filing this complaint are from Washington, DC. It probably should have been filed in New York with the demands specifying only NY victims for the time being. Why might you ask NY? Well, it's the only state to have established net neutrality as a telecommunications standard (See 16 NYCRR Part 605). And this case is exactly the definition of what those standards are put in place to protect!
So while it may have had to be filed with the FCC, the real place where you could pretty much guaranty a (maybe even court case) win against Comcast is in the state of New York. I know they provide service there and I think it would be more prudent to first prove your point there, then file a complaint to the FCC from New York after the local government has awarded the victims there.
In my opinion, a guaranteed sure win in a small battle is bigger than a huge uncertainty in the overall war.
My work here is dung.
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.
While I applaud this effort to hold Comcast accountable and hopes it works, it is going to be an uphill battle to defend bittorrent, given the current status of P2P in the courts, and media's eyes.
It seems the more prudent approach would be to use the blocking of Google traffic, as Google is loved by the media and has been helpful to the courts on a few occasions, to file the complaint, and then rely upon the Google decision to defend torrent traffic. Much like the "tame" playboy defends the more hardcore free "speech"
Go defenders of Neutrality!
Screw Comcast and get Gmail notifier to work again!
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.
You know they aren't too concerned with QoS because they would shape *all* your bandwidth instead of just torrent traffic if you are using "too much," whatever that means. I say if I pay for X amount of bandwidth DAMN YOU if you say I can't use it all.
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.
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Huh? I'm still trying to figure out how Comcast was blatant and deceptive.
Wait, wait, I got it. They are so dumb, they failed at being deceptive and ended up being blatant! What kind of a world do we live in when a multi-million dollar evil corporation can't even be counted on to lie properly?!?
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Someone says this on every single article relating to traffic shaping, QoS, or filtering. Somehow this one even got a +5 Insightful (at one point), despite being based on an invalid premise. ISPs are not common carriers. The line-level divisions of the telecommunications companies are common carriers. The divisions relating to actual Internet service, and other non-telco ISPs like Comcast, are "information carriers" (or some such label) and not subject to common-carrier regulations. The ISPs don't want to be common carriers; they're much better off as they are. You can't threaten them with withdrawing a regulatory status they never had and never wanted.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They should have made their complaint more clear cut from the common industry practice of QOS.
spoofing packets to intentionally interrupt a connection is very different of course, but the way they present it, using the term "degrading", is not specific enough.
"interrupting" is more accurate, and more egregious.
Comcast will likely use the long time case of QOS to weasel out of it, harming the credibility of an honestly legitimate gripe.
If they can't weasel out of it, this could put QOS in danger, resulting in terrible performance of voip, streaming video, vpn, online gaming, and other latency sensitive applications.
In their justifiable zealotry they did not put their complaint through the proper egghead QA channels, and not only may the entire net neutrality cause may suffer for it, but even a "win" may ultimately be a harm.
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Every time something like this comes up, there is a cacophony of geekdom crying out tripe about "common carrier" status without any understanding about what those words *mean*.
Do we not ridicule politicians who make laws based on their completely boneheaded ideas about what technology means ("tubes", anyone?)? Do we not loathe judges who rule in favor of the "MAFIAA" due to their complete lack of even elementary comprehension of what is involved in, say, *watching* a DVD? Do we not scoff at the astonishingly anemic attempts to create engaging television and movie plots out of programming and information security? Do we not groan inwardly (and some of us, outwardly) when a reporter tarnishes the good name that was "hacker"?
If we're going to claim to be anything better than those who speak from ignorance, let us cease with the "common carrier" whine until such point as we know what it *means*!
It is acceptable to give a big Skywalkerian whine about the "system" that lets a huge corporation own separately regulated subsidiaries, with some being "telecommunications services" subject to "common carrier" laws and others being "information services" not included in "common carrier" laws. (Whining to elected officials may not be any more productive, but then again, it would be the proper venue.) On the other hand, whining here while not even bothering to know what you're whining about? That makes you ignorant, and if the trend I pointed out above is any indicator, we don't abide ignorance here.
(Guess I should've used the rant markup, but I couldn't remember whether it was supposed to be SGML, XML, OOpsXML, or what, so it likely wouldn't validate even if I did.)
This will just encourage comcast to say, "You're right, here is what it costs us" and establish a new class of service and adjust ToS. Its no longer net neutrality if its not part of the package. Jumping from $60 - $600/month to have isn't worth it to me. Premium dedicated bandwidth is like $200 per Mbps for sustained traffic. How much is BT worth to you?
I expect this will go nowhere or just like everything else, comes back to bite the consumer.
I was downloading the latest Ubuntu distribution a couple of days ago using TimeWarner cable. The download went very fast, but I notice I wasn't seeding very may users, and the few that were had 5Kb speeds.
After I finished downloading, I decided to let it run OVERNIGHT to reseed back to the world. When I checked in the morning, I had only updated 10MB and I noticed peers would pop-up in the window, show a few kb of transfer and then disappear again. I'm assuming that TimeWarner is sending dummy packets to the OTHER computers to stop my seeding.
However, MY download didn't seem affected AT ALL. Also, there were several clients that seems to stay connected but with very low transfer rates.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
I download linux iso's daily, and legal torrents all day long. This type of bandwithing hogging is fucking cocksucking bullshit.
First off before I even get to the throttling, we are the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and we lag so behind in other countries in bandwith speed, and comcast has literally done NOTHING in their long term plan to provide more bandwith speed. They are milking their shitty lines for every Americans last penny. Its corporate greed at its finest. Big brother setting his hand in there to make sure im not taking up to much bandwith that I PAY FOR and limiting my legal torrents download speed.
EAT A DICK
and yet strangely, they don't have to pay as much for downstream traffic.. Seems it would be more efficient to re-route the trackers to look to local clients on their network.. IE, if I want to download ubuntu, I would consider it a benefit if they pointed me to someone else on their network that was seeding, or further along downloading, as I could finish it faster.. And they wouldn't have duplicated traffic coming through their gateway pipes.
They could have manipulated things in a way that would be a win for all, but they chose to do it in a way that was a win for them.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
Gah - you know when someone pulls out that phrase, you will soon see idiocy camouflaged with high-falutin' language.
The poster is correct - bandwidth is not an unlimited commodity, since there is no such thing as an unlimited commodity. Comcast, etc, attempted to pretend that it was in their advertising campaign by promising the impossible -- unlimited bandwidth. In a sane world, they contractually obligated themselves to bankruptcy by their fraud, hoping that the price in bandwidth costs would always outpace bandwidth usage growth, instead of actually advertising what limitations they could afford.
And now we get all kinds of sophistry to defend them. Obviously, you have to have some form of bandwidth cap. You could do it by total bandwidth monthly or weekly, you could degrade bulk services at high demand (and state it openly in your terms) or you could drop high-bandwidth users (and state it openly in your terms).
But they're the ones who have f*cked up, and want to have their cake and eat it too. They're the ones who still have "Unlimited Bandwidth!!!" ads at the malls still today.
This is no tragedy of the commons. There's no abuse because contractual obligations are lacking and oversight is limited to traditional norms. This is a case of explicit contractual obligations that are clearly delineated, where "property rights" are quite obvious, where private entities aren't sharing but are trading. It's just that one of those entities is much larger than the rest of the partners, and that entity is simply trying to defraud their partners by promising what they can't deliver.
Libertarian language is just so Orwellian.
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!
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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".)
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No, you'd still need a law because FCC policy can change at the FCC's (not the public's) whim.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sounds like you are just doing a bunch of downloading, using your connection mainly for push-at-you content and VOIP. They will get around to trampling the VOIP that's not their own pretty soon, but it sounds like it's working ok for you right now. Your usage sounds kind of high, but before long Comcast will be approaching those television networks and other content providers with their hands out, looking for a little more money from them. Because basically you're what Comcast wants - a good consumer.
Yes, it seems Comcast is fine with the downloads using BT. Apparently you didn't check to see if you are helping with contributing bandwidth (you do know that Ubuntu is supported solely through contributions from the community, don't you?) when you were running those BT downloads. You probably just waited for the download to finish, then closed BT right away. If you had left it up for a while, you would have noticed that the peers trying to connect with you to share those files were sent barely a trickle of data, and then got bumped off. That's what Comcast is doing to BT now.
We are participating, sharing, and contributing. But Comcast is interfering with us. They don't want us to have a voice. They just want us to sit back and take what they're sending.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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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Why don't we let ISPs decide whether they are common carriers? If they are common carriers, then net neutrality should apply as a matter of course: the key feature of a common carrier is that it doesn't distinguish between "good" and "bad" content flowing across its network, as long as the content doesn't harm the network itself. That's why you can't sue the phone company if someone slanders you while talking on their phone, and the police won't go after Verizon if someone uses FIOS to download something illegal.
On the other hand, if an ISP filters traffic in any way, they are implicitly saying "We monitor our network." Once they do this, they should assume responsibility for whatever flows across it.
I think most ISPs would choose common carrier status over perpetual civil and criminal liability for the usage of their networks.