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."

Comments

Who is behind on their payments?

[Adambomb]

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.

Re:Who is behind on their payments?

[DCTooTall]

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.)

Re:Who is behind on their payments?

[_KiTA_]

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.


Myself, given how much the current administration is in the pocket of large businesses, I have to wonder if this is a hearing to consider making said content screwovers mandatory for all ISPs.

Re:Who is behind on their payments?

[alshithead]

"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."

I think "wishy-washy" is generous. In my opinion he's not "wishy-washy", he's an administration corporate servant. The only reason that he's said he will investigate is that he thinks that will show the public that he is following his job description...minimally. If you think that his investigation will find that Comcast consumers have been denied their rights then think again. The quote I saw in another article today stated quite specifically that he knows and feels that providers have the right to "manage their traffic". I can just about guarantee that the FCC will find that "in the interests of all users, those sharing files (even if legitimate) must have their traffic delayed in order to provide the best service to all users". He won't even think about exploring the fact that providers over-promise services and should instead upgrade their infrastructure to provide those services as promised versus putting the brakes on traffic that might compromise overall end user satisfaction. What a crock.

Comcast == evil;

[kurt555gs]

I am a Comcast subscriber, and I really resent that they charge me 50+ BUX per month for "unlimited" internet, but when I want to download a linux installation DVD via BitTorrent, I can't.

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.

Re:Comcast == evil;

[Adambomb]

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.

Re:Comcast == evil;

[nelsonen]

It stopped being just "their network" when they signed agreements with local governments for access to public rights-of-way.

THANK GOD ... maybe

[milsoRgen]

/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.

Has nothing to do with Republicans

[hax0r_this]

I can't believe people around here still believe that they can blame government corruption and stupidity on Republicans. Since the democrats have taken back congress if anything congress has gotten worse on these issues. Where before we would have bills sponsored by a bunch of republicans with maybe a few democrats, and a bunch of democrats opposing it just because they hate republicans, now we have bunches of democrats sponsoring some of the most blatantly stupid and corrupt bills I have ever seen, and bunches of republicans backing them.

Re:Has nothing to do with Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Just blame it all on the Repubemocrats then

Hold on there skippy!

You're fooling no one with your obvious attempt to shift blame away from the Demoblicans.

Re:Has nothing to do with Republicans

[Surt]

Bush picks the people who work at the top of many government organizations, and they pick the people below. It has little to do with congress, and that's why it still gets (appropriately) blamed on Republicans.

If we have a democratic president, we'll start blaming (and whip out our brooms) him and the democrats if these shenanigans continue.

Re:Has nothing to do with Republicans

[Jay Clay]

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.

Are they doing this everywhere?

[anotherone]

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?

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[jordan314]

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.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[achilles777033]

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.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[DCTooTall]

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.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[webmaster404]

Are you encrypting your BT traffic? If so then Comcast thinks it is just normal traffic like HTTP/FTP and will let it go.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[webmaster404]

Even though the RIAA/MPAA probably has something to do with this (if they can buy congress they can buy just about any other thing) but I think that it is that Comcast wants to advertise really high download speeds without having the network to back it up. If they block P2P traffic they take out much of the traffic and can keep the *whatever MB/s* they advertise without having to spend extra money to get the network. I don't doubt that this could be an easy front to appeal to the RIAA and the like but I think it is more of "lets try to get the highest MB/s we can on as cheap of a network we can get" more than anything else.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[DCTooTall]

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.

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[xeoron]

I am house sitting using a Comcast connection and the only seeding I can do is if it is encrypted. Somewhat related, I have Verizon DSL at home and I have noticed a increased of forged reset packets while on bit-torrent over the last few months; though I think Azureus ignores most of them. I want to know-- why aren't other ISP's getting reports on their similar habits?

Re:Are they doing this everywhere?

[onepoint]

>>Upload traffic is just as demanding as download traffic to a server.

when thinking ISP you need to think last mile. an last mile traffic has been for a very long time pull traffic ( while a web site is push ). P2P has upset the apple cart ( and has become a big thorn, leading to net neutrality issues ).

Peering agreements for a long time have been rather stale, last mile pays a percentage and web site host pay a percentage. Peering locations pushed and pulled rather balanced ( if it's off then someone had to pay), P2P tosses all those agreements right out the window, all of a sudden, a last mile location become a push, and web host are flat, peering gets out of billing sync, All the last mile ISP's have a right to be nervous, they really don't know what there push traffic is going to look like and they are worried about the bills.

Personally, I think that, throttling is a great idea. I also think local server's that act as a torrent data relay site should be created ( that's why we have web cache's ) to cover a large percentage of the "legal" file trading and software updates. we need someway for daytime business needs and night time file sharing.

Republican?

[Quila]

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).

IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT!

[Skapare]

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).

To net neutrality naysayers: told you so.

[DamnStupidElf]

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.

Re:Time Warp

[RollingThunder]

I don't know about you, but for me, nine days ago was last year.

We need this in Canada

[Froster]

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

Re:We need this in Canada

[webmaster404]

No you don't. The FCC has really done nothing other to get us into this mess. First they protected monopolies to "help innovation", these government protected monopolies such as Comcast began to charge outrageous amounts for cable/internet. Whenever a local ISP/Cable company started up they were either absorbed into a huge corporation, charge nearly the same rates for sub-par service or quickly went bankrupt. It is only in the last 3-4 years that independent ISPs/cable companies have begun to pop up and even then they are usually nothing more then an arm of a super-corporation. When the government is involved, individuals always, always, always lose. Perhaps it is different in Canada but here in the US, the only thing government does when it comes to technology is maybe reversing their previous mistakes.

Re:We need this in Canada

[Froster]

I am not a Rogers internet customer anymore - but my parents are. They cannot subscribe to DSL in their area, and I hear all the complaints that they have with Rogers service.

Personally, I'm a TekSavvy customer and could not be happier (other than even more speed or an ever cheaper price).

Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent?

[Ajehals]

I agree that if you are hosting anything you really need to be using a 'business class connection', if you are using a connection for work or for anything critical you need a 'business class connection', not for the transfer rates (it seems the lowest tiers at the business level are no different from ADSL/DSL connections) but for the SLA that (should) accompany such a connection*.

In return however the ISP should provide the service being paid for. If you are paying £X for X 'Speed' with 'unlimited downloads', then that should be what you get, whether by simply browsing the web, watching on-line video, listening to on-line radio or seeding the latest Debian ISO's as a torrent (I'm seeding the whole lot at the moment because I feel I should use the bandwidth I have...).

Peer-to-peer traffic is not client-server traffic, and it is normally non commercial, and as to whether it is legitimate content being passed is not a concern of the ISP anyway (do they block spam, viral or malicious code, libellous comments? No. If there are terms and conditions attached to a service those should be clear (that way a customer can make an informed choice), there is nothing wrong with an ISP preventing end users from running a given type of server or use the connection in a certain way, but it must be clear when the user signs up.

Lastly, it is up to the Linux distributions how they distribute their ISO's, Bittorrent is perfect for this even if other methods are available and have been (and are) used, so your comment relating to how Linux should b distributed is slightly valid, but unfair and short sighted, especially given that those organisations providing Linux distributions are not all corporations so splitting the load is sensible. Bittorrent *is* used by people who wish to transfer material in breach of copyright because it is fast, practical and can be fairly anonymous but that is not its sole purpose and it is just as easy to use other methods to distribute that material as it would be to use alternate methods to distribute Linux.

People who distribute material in breach of copyright law should be punished to the full extent of the law (even if the law in question is at this point fairly insane), they are aware of the penalty's and still take the risk of doing it, but there is no good reason to ban a whole slew of technologies because they can be used to facilitate distribution. By that logic any uncontrolled storage medium that allows itself to be written to, and any uncontrolled method of data transmission should be banned, we would end up with computers that have similar multimedia capabilities as TV's (without PVR's/DVD players etc..) and radios (without a tape/MD deck), with the added benefit of having to pay for everything on a PAYG basis.

*Any Slasdhotters that have ever worked in technical support for an ISP will be familiar with calls from customers on the cheapest residential deals demanding their connection be fixed because their business relies on it, whilst simultaneously threatening lawsuits...

PS, not sure if the parent was intended as flamebait so I assumed not, and sorry for losing the plot halfway through.

No, bandwidth is not unlimited...

[gillbates]

But the cable companies market it as if it were.

They chose to use the term unlimited usage, and if they don't want to offer unlimited access, they should change their TOS.

There's nothing criminal or unethical about expecting a company to provide what it has promised. Some of us would be quite willing to pay, say, only $10 per month for a 1.3 Mbs connection, even if it came with a 5 GB/month transfer cap. But the cable companies won't do that. Instead, you have to buy their unlimited plan, and pay for bandwidth that you don't even use.

And the cable company will happily resell your unused bandwidth to others. It's called capacity planning, and they use statistical analysis to figure out the bandwidth that most people will actually use. Problem is, they have a financial interest in fully utilizing their equipment, i.e., buying only as much as needed. Which, when their estimates are wrong, results in lousy service for customers. Your problem is not that you are paying for someone else's bandwidth, but rather, that the cable company is making you pay for bandwidth they don't expect you to use.

Your torrent-hosting neighbor is simply using all of the bandwidth for which he paid. He's not using yours. (That is, unless he's owned your box, but that's a different thread entirely...)

Time Warner Roadrunner

[christurkel]

I believe Time Warner does this as well. Before they purchased Adelphia, I could use BitTorrent just fine. A month after their take over, it started. HTTP and FTP downloads were fine, bittorrent downloads would start fast and within several seconds slow down to less than dial up speed.

it's working fine for me

[justdrew]

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?

Hello Mr. "Law"

[Foamy]

I'd like to introduce you to a person I think you will be fond "of".

Please meet Mr. "Unintended Consequences".

Cost

[Scutter]

to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber

*sigh* Well, I guess I can expect my cable fees to go up again. I wonder if this will be called a "Federal cost recovery fee" as a line item on my bill.

Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent?

[RobertLTux]

okay so lets do a car analogy you pay $Station for "unlimited Gas" @ $2000 a month
and you are told single car only now what $station doesn't know is you drive a SUV
and you drive a lot so you are clicking what would be $90.00 bills almost daily so
instead of asking you to switch to a larger plan or tell you that you getting to much
they start dropping the octane on your gas to say 30 octane (from the 87 you are supposed to get)
or they always seem to have problems with the pump you are at.

For a Gas station these would be suicide (and in the octane case a felony) why is it okay for ISPs?

Re:Wrong

[sumdumass]

Actually, Cable was a created monopoly, the only differences in who and where resides on who controlled the medium at the time they came to town. Typically, this has been the local governments and they created the monopoly in exchange for coverage in areas that wouldn't be profitable.

This role has shifted somewhat to the state and feds but can still be controlled by the local governments to some degree.

Re:bout freakin time

[TheCarp]

You know, I am also a comcast subscriber. I have all but taken the last steps (sniffers on both ends and then wading through a few meg of traffic) to prove they are screwing with my ssh connections too. I pay for unlimited high speed access, and yet... they kill my ssh sessions all the time.

In fact, I can reliably see ssh sessions last for a while in text mode, and then die within seconds of using a port forward to throw back vnc from my workstation at work. Text mode ones die too, but they last longer.

The kicker though, if I move ssh to another port, I can work for hours.

I have a workaround, but you know, I kinda feel like I am getting screwed as a consumer. I am seriously considering just going back to speakeasy because I always felt I could at least trust them to deliver the service I am paying for.

Honestly once I decide who to replace them with, I plan to utterly boycott comcast, cable etc. However I guess if the fcc is investigating for this, my grievence isn't too far removed. Should I be capturing sniffer logs and contacting the FCC?

-Steve

Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent?

[phorm]

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...

Life long lasting Impression

[DeanFox]

Awhile back a big brewhaha went down with my local cable company and they scheduled a hearing with the government oversight committee. A FCC type local commission that governed the cable company monopoly.

I tuned in 10 minutes late but watched the hearing. for 40 minutes I watched 5 cable company executives on the bench defend their actions against accusations from the committee.

What I messed in the first 10 minutes were the introductions. I was wrong. The accuations were coming from the consumers. The five on the bench were the commission. There are certain epiphanies in life that just stick.

I have zero faith this FCC "investigation" will result in anything but new laws that forbid the consumer from exposing proprietary company practices with stiff fines and jail sentances for bloggers, etc. who expose company secrets. Maybe a new law making packet sniffing illegal. They'll figure something out.

-[d]-