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FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."
Can you seed? Sandvine doesn't limit your downloading, it prevents seeding (though that in turn can slow your downloads down). If you notice all your peers dropping to zero after your download is finished on an otherwise popular torrent, you're being affected.
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
Are you encrypting your BT traffic? If so then Comcast thinks it is just normal traffic like HTTP/FTP and will let it go.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I'm not sure what's been done about this particular issue, but let's not act as if the Republicans haven't played their part in our current government being stagnant. With a year left to go, the Republicans already have the most filibusters in the history of the US, and they blantantly admit that they're blocking votes on stuff to make the democrats look bad. Here's a quote from Trent Lott (the guy who was all about how unfair it was for the Democrats to not give an "up or down" vote for Gonzales): "The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us. The Democrats are the ones taking the blame for not getting anything done."
They even introduce bills and when it gets to the floor, they block it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/washington/12cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The Democrats "taking back congress" isn't as succinct as you insinuate.