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FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Blocks BitTorrent
master_p writes "The FCC's formally issued draft net neutrality regulations have a huge copyright loophole in them; a loophole that would theoretically permit Comcast to block BitTorrent just like it did in 2007 — simply by claiming that it was 'reasonable network management' intended to 'prevent the unlawful transfer of content.' The new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent, even if these ISP practices end up inflicting collateral damage on perfectly lawful content and activities."
Obviously, the only use of Bit Torrent is illegal file sharing. /SARCASM
I have a bad feeling about this...
Next step would be get Neutered.
Dear
Is this just protocols or also destinations?
Could your ISP block websites which it considers to be involved in copyright infringement?
Might it even only allow you communicate with a whitelist of IP's?
We told you that any government-mandated net neutrality was going to be a lot of fun.
But alas, people continue to live with their idyllic, dog-like trust of government, politicians, and bureaucrats, and didn't listen.
Not to mention the whole net neutrality debate was mostly paranoia anyway. The real solution is for local governments to do something about the monopolies they grant telcos, but it's always easier to pray that god (the government) saves the day.
Stupid. As people will just change protocol, so.. what will you do? repeat your strategy? then enter on a tecnological battle where you ban thinks that "look" like suspicious "bad" traffic. How much time will this war need to result on a almost totally broken internet where all applications that need reliable latency fail for not apparent reason?
Do not start trowing rocks, if you live in a cristal house, concast.
-Woof woof woof!
You expected "net neutrality" regulations to call for actual neutrality? Of course it was going to have some caveat in it to allow ISP's to regulate traffice the government doesn't want to flow.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
both are correct.....
BitTorrent was used to spread the Climate Research Unit's hacked emails to show how climate change is a hoax. In the future, we will not have the ability to distribute important news due to RIAA's concern about getting royalties from 70 year old Mickey Mouse cartoons.
That's a very interesting post coming from someone with a name like you.
Here you go, your neutrality regulations,
bought and paid for by your local, friendly *AA.
no no, no need to give thanks, they're here for you.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
I'm guessing this is less an unintentional "loophole" than a very intentional concession to the lobbyists who are writing this bill.
The only reason Congress cares about "Net Neutrality" is that some big tech companies like Google are lobbying hard for it, while big service providers like Comcast are lobbying against it. But since neither group actually cares about your right to use BitTorrent, the RIAA lobbyists are free to stick in some extra restrictions like this.
I'm ever so glad the Supreme Court thinks these corporate groups should have even MORE influence over our elections.
They're so much better. Aren't they? Aren't you glad this is left up to the government now rather than individual service providers? Aren't you glad you won't have a choice anymore?
Someone has to say it: The more things change, the more they stay the same. If torrents and other "legal" P2P sharing is allowed to be blocked, what is the point of this entire legislation? My impression of the FCC was that it was supposed to promote and ensure fairness amongst the telecom and internet providers. I was sincerely hoping that the FCC would grow a spine.
The key word here is: " unlawful transfer of content"
The reason BitTorrent has not suffered the fate of Napster is that there is significant noninfringing uses, ranging from Linux ISOs to public broadcasting to companies like Vuse which use BitTorrent for purely legal, liscenced content.
Thus you could do blocking of specific torrents under this proposed regulation, but you couldn't block all bittorrent.
It is questionable to include, because I don't like the idea of copyright enforcement in the wire (its too easy to abuse), but the headline is wrong: this would not block BitTorrent.
Test your net with Netalyzr
So nothing has changed, but the reach of the FCC grows.
Sounds like a perfect win for them.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The irony in all this is that legal file sharers will be harmed, while people torrenting stuff illegally will simply find solutions that are harder to distinguish from normal traffic.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Do you think you'll get more of a response if you write your senator or the CEOs of Comcast and AT&T and Verizon?
If there were no regulation against monopolies, internet service would almost certainly be in the hands of one. They wouldn't ask anyone for permission to block any protocol, they would just do it. (CEO Bob wants another 10% to the bottom line? No problem... shut down port 25 and double the price of mail storage.) Not to mention the fact that without serious investment by DARPA, the internet may not have existed in the first place.
When a functioning democracy is in place, you can affect change with your vote, and it barely costs you anything except your time. That's supposed to be the equalizer for corporate power, since you're not going to have as much money as anyone in the Fortune 10,000 (if there is such a thing). When there's not even a mechanism in place to reign in business shenanigans, they just have to hold back enough so there aren't riots. Unless they can figure out a way to make money from riots.
We are supposed to be a constitutional republic, which holds everyone equal in the eyes of the law, which should be written by the society as a whole -- not just the rich and powerful. This is specifically due to the abuses of the monarchies and churches and companies that dominated society at the time of our founding, and continue today. Once again, the answer to a non-functioning democracy is a functioning one. Throwing away the government check to corporate power won't do anyone a damn bit of good, except for the people who own the corporations.
So bit torrent gets blocked? The neat thing about innovation is that it out paces legislation. There will be another technology that will come out to replace bit torrent in P2P that will defeat Comcast's Great Firewall.
It could work almost identically to BitTorrent and no sane ISP would block HTTP.
Anyone interested in working on a FOSS implementation, PM me.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
When they were going after P2P networks like Napster and Kazaa, you could argue the merits of what the technology could be used for versus what it was actually being used for.
However, BitTorrent sees very widespread legitimate use that you can't argue with. And honestly, in those legit cases, blocking BitTorrent won't reduce network traffic, but instead shift it back into the FTP/HTTP client-server model, instead of allowing BitTorrent to distribute the load among people who already have the data.
Well the old argument was that consumers who use a lot of bandwidth were pirating content.... But the world has changed, For example I only watch TV via the internet now. All 100%, paid for, legal content.
So if they think blocking (slowing down etc) p2p will fix their network problems, think again.
If they block bittorrent, they'll suddenly have millions of WoW players at their main offices with pitchforks and torches demanding to know why they can't update...
Right... Because if the gov't didn't do anything, this would somehow be better?
The Government did do something - it allowed and even legislated local monopolies.
I'm sure there's plenty of "unlawful transfer of content" happening by plain, old HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and innumerable other internet protocols.
Next they'll be suggesting we block the highways and postal service for the same reasons -- because they are being used for "unlawful transfer of content".
... Getting rid of lobbyists in DC? It's pretty obvious who put together this bill... But then, it's been pretty obvious the lobbyists have written almost all of the legislation being pushed through Congress and the Senate...
If we assume a generalized policy of allowing interference with traffic where piracy is suspected, the logical evolution is that end-to-end communications on the Internet is eventually doomed. BitTorrent is just one technology used to get information directly from my IP to your IP. What happens when an ISP realizes that IRC DCC SEND exists, and that some piracy happens that way? Or that encrypted VPN's have been used for this purpose? What happens as encryption becomes ever more prevalent? Do ISP's block all encrypted traffic between end-user endpoints just because there might be piracy going on?
What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Can't wait to see people implement this RFC!
You've got a malformed tag
...seems the logical and inevitable conclusion to this arms race.
For those of you who screamed you had a "right" to control the property of your service providers to tell them how they had to run their network by the simple fact that you couldn't build a network of your own.
You found that the only way to enforce that right was through the use of a gun, in other words the government. If in whatever way your twisted logic somehow decided by regulating the internet you would free it, here is just one example of the logical consequence of these types of regulations.
Wait until the special interests start lobbying the FCC for the right to force the service providers to insert disclaimers here, or block some sort of thing they declare as libel but are too cowardly to sue for.
And wait until you start paying the "Net Neutrality recovery fee" as a percentage of your monthly bill at a rate set not by any need of providing bandwidth, but by the whim and vote of unaccountable bureaucrats in the PUC or FCC or some other allegedly beneficial set of parasites.
Brother, you asked for it.
Logical Disconnect
How is this going to affect these two uses of BitTorrent? What about companies that do large scale DLC deployment using BT?
Does the regulation mention BitTorrent, or is this just the author's interpretation?
Any time someone says "Law X would let Person Y do Z by claiming A, B, and C", take it with a grain of salt. Sure, they can claim that blocking BT is a reasonable restriction, and then it would be up to the courts to decide if it really is. If the court decides not, then blocking BT is illegal. Anyone can claim whatever they want; and look how well that worked for SCO in the long run.
Might the court reach the wrong conclusion? That risk is inherant in the nature of the court system. It's the responsibility of those who understand the legitimate uses of BT to advocate for them as effectively as possible. Of course, every moment spent arguing that "sharing" of copyrighted works should be legal is worse than wasted effort. That argument will increase regulators' perception that blocking BT is reasonable.
what next for comcarp nbc cable only? csn (all areas) as well?
Sci-FI cable only that will just make more people use torrents.
if they do that crap lets block there offices with satellite dish's.
Well it looks like the US of F*ck You is going to try it again. By blocking Bittorrent traffic, they will effectively kill pretty much the entire Torrent Community (since a large majority of legal and illegal torrent users are in the US, not to mention Trackers). This should be grounds for "war" from other country's since the US is trying to take control of a world resource. China shouldn't be allowed to do it, so why should America?
The good news is that with IEEE, EFF, and the Open Source Community standing up for net neutrality and for torrenting, the US Gov is going to have a hard time actually keeping this in place. Imagine every Geek, Hacker, and Programmer that builds and supports the most powerful programs in the world (things like MySql, and Apache), then imagining them protesting with a "sit-down" aka power down protest. The internet would break and every country that wasn't already up in arms would soon be. Ah...what a day that will be. See you at Power Down 2011.
I'm sorry, but the whole idea that we should pass laws making the Internet completely unrestricted is contradictory. Laws by their very nature are restrictive. The laws passed on broadcast TV and radio attest to that.
But assuming it would be possible to pass such a law, it will never happen because any such law would by its very nature violate the rights of the service provider. Can you imagine passing a law which says I can broadcast anything I want over Comcast's cable infrastructure? It would never happen. Because they own the infrastructure, they have a right to decide what goes over it.
Likewise, if they refuse to carry a show I want to see I have a right as a consumer to go with a different carrier.
Bottom line is, if they own the wire, they have a right to set rules on how it may be used. If you don't like the rules they set, go with a different provider. That's what I did.
Permanently seed a bitttorent for whatever linux distribution. Somebody cut you out. Show you were seeding Linux BT. ball in their hand now to prove you were doing something else.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
As I recall one successful defence if accused of aiding copyright violations was the fact that the ISP never, ever, did any type of censorship or even observation of the content flowing through their servers. It seems to me that if Comcast blocks Bit Torrent then they become liable for violations that they fail to allow to continue. This may be a serious case of a very large company shooting themselves in the foot.
This is more like the old POTS and having Ma Bell say, "You can't talk about sex. And since we own the copper wires, we have the right to decide what can and cannot be said over our network."
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
FCC has officially redefined "net neutrality" to be something it is not. Meanwhile, all the nerds and geeks out there get "net neutrality" like they asked for. Newspeak at its finest.
I don't know how many of you guys reading may have seen my short rant about how Lawyers (who write these ideas out) put vague wording and loopholes so that there is plenty of room for litigation.
This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. WTF does the word 'reasonable' mean in the context of the LAW? It means you need a frikkin' lawyer! That's what it means. It means you need a judge to listen to the B.S. and at least one lawyer to explain how something was or was not reasonable.
This is junk. The lawmakers need to be more specific and use words to describe exactly what exceptions there could be and the limits to which those exceptions could be implemented. If new need arises, amendments should be made.
These junkbag lawyers are putting these vague words in on purpose because 1) It allows their camps to keep taking donations from these fuckwad commo companies and 2) it creates and perpetuates more litigation, which ensure job futures for lawyers, judges, and lawmakers.
Don't accept the bullshit response that 'the world is too complex for clear laws'. That's a load of crap. If you can't be clear about what you're trying to legislate, maybe you need a bigger brain and a few more hours of giving a shit before you write it all up. Maybe you need to actually know what the hell you're doing and put an EFFORT into it so that the laws/bills can actually hold water.
Putting words like 'reasonable' in there is just a big mess of grey area begging for exploitation, exemption, and outright disregard. Reasonable is a relative term and that which one man may consider reasonable evidence may be worthless to another. In this case, a judge (and comcast) may think that even 1 illegal bit-torrent is evident, an thus reasonably true (which it is), from where reasonable controls could be reasonably applied...
GTFO. We won't see clear laws/expectations as citizens so long as our country is run by lawyers who want to keep us in a cloud of confusion and foggy litigation. The last thing a lawyer wants is for the people to actually know exactly what is going on, else they would not be in high demand.
Every time a net neutrality article comes up, I ask the same question--how is handing control of the internet over to the government somehow better than what we have today, as if the government is some incorruptible entity that does everything right? Giving it to the government makes it susceptible to lobbying from groups like the RIAA, and I knew torrent traffic would be the first on the chopping block.
This is sad but funny. Out of some alarmist political agenda scaring people about a problem that doesn't even exist, naive people were demanding that we give the government control of the internet, taking it away from ISP sysadmins based on the usual anti-capitalism arguments. Well, have fun, because you're getting what you want...government control of your once-free internet.
..because You Can't Stop The Signal, Mal.
They can decide on whatever rules they want, and by the next week someone else will have found a way around it.
Memo to the FCC, Comcast, and the rest of you: GIVE UP. We'll transfer whatever we want to, whenever we want to, and you can't stop us, not now, not tomorrow, not ever. We'll do it even if we have no other reason than to piss you off, and in some cases pissing you off is the greatest lulz of all, watching you sputter and shake your fists at the air in your typically impotent and helpless manner because You can't stop the signal.
We are many,
We are legion,
We do not forgive,
We do not forget.
Expect us .
How would it even be possible for BitTorrent to "suffer the same fate" as Napster?
Who would they sue?
Napster was a centralized service, and thus a vulnerable target. BitTorrent is a protocol, they can attempt to block it, but it will never be "shut down".
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
You can sign the petition here: http://www.realnetneutrality.org/
Claims to be part of the EFF's effort and it's linked to directly on their site.
its about handing it over to a government tha has been and is controlled by corporate hollywood
a non lobbied democraic govt would care about its people and not a few lil twitty actors
With words of encouragement that the internet be free and open for all to use and communicate via?
No sig for you!!
The fact is; they do.
To put it another way, if NBC became a porn network you can bet Comcast would stop carrying their programming. On the other side, if you setup a porn server you can bet they'll disconnect you.
And because they own the wire, they do in fact have a right to do that. As a customer you are paying for the privilege of using their property.
As a customer you also have a right to give your money to someone else who doesn't restrict you. As I said, that's what I do.
Who could have predicted that more government regulation of the Internet might have a downside?
This seems like one of those laws whose name is the opposite of what it
actually ensures. These laws are often the result of powerful and successful
industry lobbying. They mollify the detail-averse masses, while allowing
the exploitation to continue.
We have a tree-protection bylaw in my town. It says, you cannot cut down
a 12" or greater diameter tree when demolishing a house for development
(and its fine print goes on to say: "unless either you give 3 months notice
to the city, or the tree would be in the way of or too close to the new building")
Any regulation that allows blocking or throttling of traffic based on measurement
of or assumptions about the specific semantics of the traffic is the OPPOSITE
of Net Neutrality, and should never be allowed to be called a Net Neutrality
law. This is positively Orwellian language redefinition.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Without a doubt, as soon as they make torrenting difficult, someones going to invent something better... I can't wait to try out whatever it is. There's nothing they can do to stop this short of shutting down the internet altogether.
The key word here is: "unlawful transfer of content"
The reason BitTorrent has not suffered the fate of Napster is that there is significant noninfringing uses, ranging from Linux ISOs to public broadcasting to companies like Vuse which use BitTorrent for purely legal, liscenced content.
...
FTFY
Anytime the word Content is used to describe traffic handling, it is by definition NOT NEUTRAL. Neutral means sending packets as packets and specifically NOT interfering with them due to what they carry, how, where from or to beyond basic routing rules. Once you step in and look at what it is/who is sending it/where its going and act based on that (again, aside from normal routing), you are no longer a neutral party. It would be like the post office opening your letter and reading it at each stop it makes between where you mailed it and who you mailed it to, and deciding if they want to deliver it or not or re-route it through alaska by dogsled to get to DC. Of course, this is the US govmnt, so they can redefine anything they want so that it fits the laws they can rewrite or ignore.
Tm
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wow government creating a giant mess with new regulations, who coulda guessed that would happen! come on, libertarians have been warning us that supporting net neutrality is just going to give the government more control over the internet and they will fuck things up. the internet is best when there is minimal government interference.
This is where the fundamental problem comes in: It is completely obvious that people need to be allowed to block spam and botnets, but it's extremely hard to offer a legally sane definition of the traffic that you should be allowed to block contrasted with the traffic you should not be allowed to block. (It gets weirder still when you consider mere traffic-prioritization questions.)
I don't think there's any solution short of implementing the Evil Bit. (All malicious traffic must set the Evil Bit in its TCP headers.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If there were true competition in the market, the government wouldn't need to do anything.
Right. But there won't be.
Last mile wiring is a natural monopoly: there's a high cost to burying the fibre that goes to your house. Most likely you're only going to be a customer at one ISP. If you want, say, five competitors, that means four unused wires.
That means each ISP has to charge each customer on average at least five times what it cost to bury the fibre.
It would be much more effective to bury one set of wires, have one organization maintain that set of wires, and then let different companies compete on delivering different services (telephony, internet, television) over those wires.
And if you're the first company to connect a wire to Joe's house, when the first competitor shows up, you could offer Joe free internet until the competitor goes away. Then you could jack up his rates to make up for the lost profit when he's back to being locked in to your service.
If there were true competition, the government wouldn't need to step in. But there isn't. So "We The People" need to step in, using the government as our tool.
Unfortunately, our tool apparently doesn't always obey our commands or do what we want.
I get modded down as a troll everytime I post it, but it has to be said...liberals are maniacally pro-government because they hate the lack of control in a free market society.
Could your troll modding be because people don't take kindly to having words and opinions---especially ones they disagree with---put in their mouth?
I mean, you're painting with a rather broad brush, here: "liberals [think/want/believe ...]". All those liberals think alike? Just like centrists and right-wingers, they all think alike too, right?
How does "Conservatives/Libertarians are maniacally anti-government because they don't like it providing the control over a free market that is necessary for said market not to degenerate into cartels and monopolies" sound? Now, I don't mean that; I'm just trying to illustrate something.
If that is indeed the law, I am sure there are plenty loopholes in it.
Here in Sherman Oaks, California at Van Nuys and Ventura there is a 76 that has always been around 10 cents dearer than the Chevron directly across the intersection. And this isn't the exception.