AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic

An anonymous reader writes Telecom giant AT&T has been awarded a patent for speeding up BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic, and reducing the impact that these transactions have on the speed of its network. Unauthorized file-sharing generates thousands of petabytes of downloads every month, sparking considerable concern among the ISP community due to its detrimental effect on network speeds. AT&T and its Intellectual Property team has targeted the issue in a positive manner, and has appealed for the new patent to create a 'fast lane' for BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic. As well as developing systems around the caching of local files, the ISP has proposed analyzing BitTorrent traffic to connect high-impact clients to peers who use fewer resources.

Comments

Seems ripe for abuse

[TWX]

Seems like it would be easy for the marketing people to be singing their own praises while the core network people are quietly instructed to start using this software to catalog and ultimately curtail such practices.

I really would rather not have my ISP QoS anything that I do. I want them to be a common-carrier. I'll shape my own traffic, thanks.

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[tlambert]

Once the data leaves your network and makes its way onto theirs, its no longer your own traffic. Why people feel like they are entitled to abuse the system that the rest of us rely on is beyond me. This country has really gone downhill.

Probably because we don't feel that it's abuse; once we've paid for a certain diameter of pipe to the rest of the Internet, it's their job to let us send or receive whatever we want over that pipe, without editorializing.

Of course, if they really want to editorialize, and demonstrate a technical ability to do so, I'm going to hold them legally responsible any time my 13 year old son is successful in accessing porn over this pipe that they are supposedly capable of exercising content control on, since by *not* exercising control on that particular content, they are responsible for the porn.

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[kheldan]

'Seems ripe for abuse' is putting it mildly, there's only one reason they'd do this, and that would be to catalog and 'curtail' filesharing, and that reason only.

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

While I haven't studied the bittorrent protocol in detail there has to be some likely cryptographic checksums at the heart of it. I'm guessing one per chunk. The infrastructure their talking about would also make it trivialy easy match those chunks against a list of data chunks that others do not want downloaded. Now you could trivially change a files checksum by introducing a bit error, reincoding, etc, etc, but this would still give them some impressive filtering abilities, particularly if you could say apply it to individual files in a torrent, which is likely possible.

Sure they have developed a bit of caching technology which could save them money, but I'd bet it is really about control. Charge extra to anyone who well wants to use feature X, be it the end user, a corporation, or anyone they possibly can.

They do the same idea with satellite and cable. They force you to buy dozens of channels to get one that you really want, and then make sure to break them up so you are stuck, one way or the other. They certainly are no closer to al la carte pricing than they were what twenty years ago? Heck you used to be able to get some al la carte pricing on C-band. With the internet we have, so far, managed to be able to pick and choose what we want, but for how much longer?

Oh look, you want to look at a non conservative news web site, well, we have a sponsor for those, so how about you poney up another $15 a month for our special news package? Look, you want to use that new fangled file sharing technology, well that will be $39.95 for the all you can eat buffet, but for the casual users we can give it to you for only $5 dollars a gigabyte. What? You had better before we introduced all that. Well, if you don't like it I'm sure you can choose another ISP. Of course if one moves in, we will just discount are service long enough to drive them out of business, so that won't last long...

If there was one thing important these days in America it is making sure the supreme court doesn't tilt further right... It may be that the American people will really fight to keep net neutrality, but these days, I doubt it....

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[oh_my_080980980]

Thank you for agreeing with everyone that your ISP is over-charging you by selling you bandwidth that you can never hope to have. Interesting how Verizon, AT&T and Comcast *NEVER* tell you that you won't every realize your speed, all they say is BLAZING FAST SPEEDS but fail to tell you, but you'll never see it.

It's also called invest in infrastructure which ISPs seem loathed to do.

Moron.

Net Neutrality

[Rockoon]

Hard to swallow, but it violates net neutrality.

We supposedly dont want any preferential treatment of any traffic....

Re:Net Neutrality

[Narcocide]

Yep, violates net neutrality. What is *harder* to swallow though is that they seem to already be doing this for U-Verse; and patenting it is probably just a ploy to force other ISPs to pay them licensing fees for what largely amounts to slightly more clever proxies configurations and a change to default router settings.

Re:Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Net neutrality isn't about treating all protocols equally, just all hosts.

Re:Net Neutrality

[JMJimmy]

Hard to swallow, but it violates net neutrality.

We supposedly dont want any preferential treatment of any traffic....

Not hard to swallow at all. You forget that the basics of fast lane technology: only those who pay get access. Sure, it may start out free but eventually it'll start getting a nominal fee and another and another.

Keep it neutral - it works.

Re:Net Neutrality

[meta-monkey]

No. Treating traffic differently based on protocol is fine. It's called QoS, and that's all this is. Net Neutrality is about the source and destination of packets.

What they're doing is conflating the two to confuse people so they'll say "gee I guess some fast lanes are okay..." and give up on Net Neutrality when really all they agreed is that QoS is a good idea.

Re:Net Neutrality

[FeelGood314]

I do want my ISP shaping my traffic. I want short messages like an HTTP request getting priority, I want low latency for my games and zero jitter for my VoIP. What I want in net neutrality is I don't want my ISP to shape traffic based on who I'm communicating with. I don't want them to give their streaming service priority over NetFlix, their email over gmail, their streaming TV over ESPN or youtube. Actually what I want from net neutrality is my ISP to only be an ISP and not be allowed in the content business.

Re:Net Neutrality

[Anubis IV]

Part of it definitely isn't violating net neutrality, and the other part of it also isn't.

The first part is nothing more than a simple CDN. Basically, they identify popular files, cache them locally in subnets where they're popular, and then serve up the cached results in order to improve overall performance. That's a simple network optimization technique that provides data as quickly as possible without any regard for who you are or who's delivering the content. ISPs and CDNs already do this with everything from YouTube to Apple's software updates to Netflix to the DNS records for your blog. It in no way violates net neutrality.

As for the second part, it's also not a net neutrality issue, despite how it's being misrepresented to try and make it look like it is. There is no "fast lane". It's simply a method for engaging in more efficient multi-path/multi-source routing, which they already deal with on a regular basis with BGP. Basically, given multiple sources (i.e. peers) for the file that you're seeking, they'll connect you with the closest one. There's nothing contrary to net neutrality about preferentially selecting closer sources for the data you're requesting. If there was, then caching as a whole would be contrary to net neutrality, and that's clearly hogwash.

TL;DR: I read the article, and there is no "fast lane". All they're doing is caching and/or connecting you to the closest source for the data you've requested, both of which are done without regard for who you are or who is providing the content. These are common techniques already in widespread use for the last few decades. The only novel aspect of the patent is that it's "for P2P". *eyeroll*

Re:Net Neutrality

[Bengie]

Why not just shape your own traffic? You get more control and they can't abuse it.

Re:if you run a VPN, they can't do shit

[deesine]

Because I have only had one problem to date. I went nuts one month and downloaded probably over 350gb. Not including streaming. TimeWarner throttled me. I paid $6/month for a vpn for 3 months and then after that no throttling, so I stopped vpn. That was 6 years ago. I still have TW. When I get throttled again or receive some c&c letter, then I get the vpn again. Why pay when I don't need it?

--

which this would violate. Near preferred over Chin

[raymorris]

This system prefers a closer, better, faster HOST. Suppose your next door neighbor and a guy on the other side of the planet both offer a chunk of a torrent you want. It is better for it to be sent from your neighbor to you. That's faster for you and it's cheaper for the ISP than transporting traffic across the world or across the country. So that's what they patented - a system for encouraging your bittorrent client to download from your neighbor rather than from someone far away.

That's a preference for a particular host - the better one.

Not really the same thing...

[meta-monkey]

It wouldn't be a violation of net neutrality to completely squash all BitTorrent traffic.

When we talk about net neutrality, we're talking about treating the traffic the same regardless of source or destination. This is different from QoS where it's perfectly fine and useful to treat packets differently based on protocol. Yes, please slow down a web page load by a millisecond so a VoIP packet isn't dropped. One is noticeable, the other isn't.

And what's the source or destination of a request for (or seeding of) a BitTorrent file? The BitTorrent network. Doesn't matter which peer you're getting it from (on your end).

What this really is is a PR wedge in the door against net neutrality by making it seem like this is a net neutrality issue, when it isn't. "Just the tip...just for a minute..." "Oh, well I guess some fast lanes are okay..." And then they're giving it to you hard and deep.

Red herring?

[Stealth Dave]

Without reading the article (this is Slashdot, after all!), this sounds more like QoS management than creating a "fast lane". My cynical side tells me that they're calling it a "fast lane" just so that they can use it as an argument against the FCC in court.

"Gee, your honor. We were going to make our network faster and more efficient, but the mean old FCC said we couldn't put in any fast lanes! Government regulation is SO burdensome!"

Re:if you run a VPN, they can't do shit

[TFlan91]

Among other reasons, this article here.

Clearly they are monitoring this activity already, all they need to do is hit the "Give me random person from list of thousands" button and you're fucked.

Re:if you run a VPN, they can't do shit

[TheGratefulNet]

it should not matter if its a linux iso or not.

the issue is: they have no need or right to look inside our packets.

ANY of our packets.

I'm not going to split hairs about society's current view toward IP rights. its a rathole that is not productive to dive into.

just leave it at: my data is my data, I will use it as I see fit and all I ask of you is to route it to the right ip addresses and route return traffic back to me. PERIOD.

I don't want them caching. if they want to try, be my guest, but I don't WANT it and I'm just fine with getting data from the real source each and every time I request it.

late to the party

[Narcocide]

You're onto something, but coming at it from the wrong direction. CDNs do also (or at least can be used to) violate net neutrality. Security and convenience are always going to be fundamentally opposing ideals.

Re:fast lane for AT&T

[PRMan]

I would think it's the opposite. If they can get you enough peers on AT&T itself, they can solve 2 problems.

1. They don't have to clog their peering agreement pipes. So the bittorrent traffic stays completely local, making it faster because of less latency.

2. The MAFIAA never finds out about their users pirating everything so they save money not playing copyright cop.

Fast Lane = Not Faster

[wasteoid]

We all know AT&T is not actually trying to make P2P faster. They are really trying to:

1. Treat P2P traffic differently - probably slow it down or render it useless somehow.
2. Trick people into thinking this would be better than Net Neutrality.
3. Stick it to customers some other evil way.