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FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling

Posted by kdawson on from the just-the-bits-please dept.

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."

15 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Who is behind on their payments? by Adambomb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given the recent stories related to chairman Kevin Martin, one has to wonder if this is fitting a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense or just that cable companies havent kept up their "lobbying" efforts or stepped on some toes.

    I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.

    --
    Ice Cream has no bones.
    1. Re:Who is behind on their payments? by DCTooTall · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Honestly I'm kinda wondering about Martin. He'd way too...wishy-washy. I kind of get the feeling that he may be more likely to have a personal issue against the CableCo's, or is trying to cause them more trouble to help the telco's get into the market. Now... the whole bittorrent thing.. Kinda hard to ignore it. It's pretty obvious after the AP story that something is fishy, and if he didn't do something he'd be a lot harder pressed to explain his actions. Besides... it's another reason to go after the Cable companies.. and comcast in general.

      Now.. you may ask why do I think Martin has a thing against the CableCo's in particular while all about helping the Bells? Let's see... he's authorized the AT&T Merger with BellSouth, helping to recreate one of the largest utility monopolies and the largest ISP out there.....Yet then starts trying to force a 70%/70% ruling on the Cable Companies in order to try and gain additional control over the Cable Industry. He then tries to cap the amount of the market which the CableCo can own at 30% (Call me crazy... but I'm pretty sure some of the bells already have that percentage, if not more....).

      There's also the whole factor of Franchise agreements. For YEARS (Decades even), In order for a cable company to come into a town, they had to negotiate with the local government for the Franchise. This Franchise agreement included payments to the local Gov'ment, Community Access channels, and honestly, a little bit of a way for the local community to excert pressure on the cableco to provide decent service thru the renewal process. (although admittedly few Gov'ments truly exercised this ability like they could've). When the Bells started wanting to offer TV service thru FIOS or AT&T's UniverseTV product, they discovered they would be legally required to negotiate with the local communities Franchising groups in order to be able to offer service. They didn't like this Idea....So they had the FCC remove the local community's ability to control who could offer service in their community by allowing the Bell's to instead get a state-wide Franchise. (Time Warner has appearently taken advantage of this ruling in Wisconsin by applying for and getting a state-wide Franchise in that state..).

      Besides removing a large hurdle for the Bell's to now offer Television services at well, it removed the local community's ability to force the providers to offer local access television. (Gov'ment billboards for announcements, classic Public Access TV, etc).

      What I'm also wondering about is how He authorizes a large merger so we basically now have only 3? Large national telcos (Verizon, AT&T, Quest.....with other rural players and 2nd teir players like Embarq). He removes a large barrier for them to enter the TV market.... and after at least one CableCo takes advantage of that removal, He then starts trying to limit the amount of the market which the Cable-Co's can be in.



      Needless to say.... I don't believe Martin is necessarily doing anything out of the goodness of his heart, or because "it's the right thing to do"..... But even if his motives aren't exactly the best, if his agreeing to look into this helps set a legal precedent for Network Neutrality... I'm all for it. (It might be interesting to see however if he either chickens out on being severe in the punishment.... or even kinda let the issue slip to a back-burner to be forgotten about, rather than do something that can bite the Telco's in the butt later.)

  2. THANK GOD ... maybe by milsoRgen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    /fingers crossed

    I really hope something comes of this... I think it could go either way really, the FCC could certainly side Comcast on the issue. But even if we could get some more truth in advertising in the business I would be happy. Let people know what services you intend to affect.

    Or my personal favorite, not knowing how much bandwidth you're payments actually cover. About half way through the afternoon I drop to 1/6th to 1/8th my 'normal' bandwidth. Till midnight and BAM full speed again... And believe me it don't take much, one DVD .iso of Ubuntu is enough to choke me all day long.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
  3. Are they doing this everywhere? by anotherone · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I see all these comments everywhere saying "I'm trying to download a bittorrent from Comcast but I can't"...

    I'm on Comcast, I have a normal residential account afaik, but I can download torrents fine. Pretty speedy too.

    I don't doubt some people are having problems but how is it I'm not?

    --
    Username taken, please choose another one.
    1. Re:Are they doing this everywhere? by achilles777033 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's starting to look to me like QoS from Comcast is luck of the draw.

      They don't really give a shit at all. They barely (or don't) maintian their infrastructure, and they don't pay attention to (or don't care) about over-population of certain areas. If you're lucky, you're living somewhere where comcast put in a big enough pipe, and recently enough that it hasn't degraded yet. If you're not, your QoS sucks.

      That's just they way it's been looking to me, I could be wrong.

    2. Re:Are they doing this everywhere? by DCTooTall · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because of the Traditional Franchise Nature of the cable industry, as well as all the aquisitions and mergers over the years, Most cable companies... and ESPECCIALLY the actual network, are not necessarily one big common shared network. Basically you could have your National Corporate level, Your Division, and then a local region and even the individual systems within that region. All could have their own policies and guidelines....or way of doing things. While some people in Comcast Territory could be in an area they've deployed sandvine, Other Comcast covered areas may not have deployed it, or just implemented it yet. Keep in mind that putting something like Sandvine on the network isn't necessarily as easy as plugging it in, and making it work.... especcially if you are in an area which was covered by another area as recently as a year or 2 ago.

      For instance.... I know Adelphia was split between Time Warner and Comcast a few years ago. Adelphia may have had 1 way which they designed their cable network and backend systems. The aquiring company may have another. Making ANY changes is a slow and drawn out process because you have to be VERY careful to avoid any negative customer impact. (IOW's... you can't just unplug a system from one network and instantly plug it into another. You could risk customer outages.. breaking networks because a router is on the wrong VLAN or ip collisioning with another item on the new network.). i'd honestly thing that throwing something like Sandvine would be more of a clean-up/tweaking of the network kind of job, after you've got everything working and talking on a common network. Not something you'd just throw in there off the bat, and then try to get everything up to the standards everything else is on.

    3. Re:Are they doing this everywhere? by DCTooTall · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually, according the original reports I read, Encrypting the traffic didn't really help. It was something about how the Sandvine system was actually going off the nature and pattern of the traffic, not just the ports or contents of the packets.

      It was because it was going off traffic patterns that people were reporting problems with programs such as lotus notes as well.

  4. Republican? by Quila · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We could get a Democrat FCC that would demand ISPs block all p2p traffic at the behest of the entertainment industry. While they hedge their bets with some Republican donations, they tend to give about two to three times as much money to Democrats.

    Yes, the biggest government whores for the entertainment industry are generally Democrats, led by Berman and Hollings (the latter thankfully recently retired).

  5. IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's just about ANY peer to peer type data.

    including random drops of google gtalk voice communications.

    random drops of game connections.

    and maybe more. those are just two i've noticed a problem with on comcast. and those two happen ALOT more often if any bit torrent downloader is running. even the damm wow updater.

    its just wrong when its bit torrent. but it wont hurt anything. bit torrent keeps plugging away. but when it happens to the other apps... it's fucking annoying AND wrong.

    1. Re:IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT! by Skapare · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've seen occaisional SSH connections drop since I started on Comcast. That never happened on dial-up. What it appears to me that they are doing is just taking a small sampling of packets ... such as maybe 1 in 10000. Then it adds the connetion tuple (host:port of each end) to a big hash table without concern of replacements. If the connection was already in the table and is seen again, it forges the RST packet. It won't happen on web connections hardly ever. On connections that last a long time AND have a lot of traffic, it gradually kills them off. It could work with quite few resources that way. For example, a PC could never handle the load of the flow through a backbone router. But if it merely got a small fraction sampling, it would gradually drop most long lived busy connections. Use IPsec to avoid it or make connections automatically restart (like BT already does).

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
    2. Re:IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      That's not going on in my neck of the Comcast woods. I use ssh connections exclusively. No traffic leaves my laptop unencrypted, even web surfing and emailing. All of it goes off to my remote proxy box. Sure from there it is unencrypted, but it's also in the middle of an ISP with plenty of other traffic.

      Anyway, the point is my ssh sessions never drop. Perhaps check your firewall and/or ssh server's settings. Perhaps something changed with keepalives or something. I have issues with that while at client networks, and for that I just have a shell loop that keeps dumping system stats and such (just fire up top and set it to update every minute), just enough to make a little traffic. I don't need to do this at home while on Comcast though.

      Funny thing with that, my wireless was acting up the other day when I got a new AP and I didn't even know it until I went to print and found I was on my neighbor's wifi and not my own, so I couldn't find my cups server. Glad I have everything encrypted. Not that I think the owner of "linksys" would even notice or know to capture the traffic ;-p Oh, what was even more funny is that they're on Comcast too, which is part of why I didn't even notice when I checked on my ssh server to see where I was coming from. I promptly switched back to my own network, since it was a little sluggish at times.

  6. Re:Comcast == evil; by Adambomb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I really do not see the Republican controlled FCC doing anything about this, however it is a good start to at least say they are investigating. I do have to take exception to that statement, while i agree with this most likely ending with nothing new. Look into FCC policies during american democratic administrations, or hell even hillary clintons current views on the subject.

    Sucks all around.
    --
    Ice Cream has no bones.
  7. To net neutrality naysayers: told you so. by DamnStupidElf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While not network neutrality per se, protocol neutrality is just as important. Traffic shaping is fine so long as it's applied to all traffic and documented in the service agreement. Comcast is proof that corporations can get away with treating Internet customers however they want when they've been granted a monopoly, which makes it the government's business to regulate them if they're going to hand out the monopolies in the first place.

  8. it's working fine for me by justdrew · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not seeing any torrent problems. there was a blip when this all flared up for a few days seemed like I couldn't seed, but I'm able to seed and receive now. In fact, reception speed seems higher than ever. Would like to see if this is still happening or was an isolated regional issue, or what the heck? am I being given the rope to hang myself? What's going on?

  9. Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent? by phorm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The idea that Comcast should provide the features of a truck for the cost of a small car is ridiculous. If you need the features of a truck, you should expect to pay for them.

    Except in this case, Comcast advertised many of the features of a truck, but then had a limited supply of trucks which they had oversold, so started giving out compact cars to customers instead...