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?

[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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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?