Comcast to face lawsuits over BitTorrent filtering
October 23, 2007 5:37 AM PDT
Comcast to face lawsuits over BitTorrent filtering
Posted by Chris Soghoian
The blogosphere is abuzz over an Associated Press investigative article this past Friday on the subject of Comcast’s BitTorrent filtering. Briefly, there were a number of articles in early September which alleged that Comcast was using some fairly sneaky techniques to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast, of course, denied any such behavior. It took a month and a half, but both a mainstream media news organization as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have tested and confirmed the previously reported claims. It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes are also suffering.
If it ain’t the truth….
(Credit: technochick / flickr)
Comcast’s PR people gave me the following statement on Monday: “Comcast does not block access to any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent…We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage our network so that they can continue to enjoy these applications.” I was also able to interview a Comcast Internet executive who would only speak on background. He bobbed and weaved, sticking to his talking points, yet a few things were clear: he would not deny that the company was sending out TCP RST packets, but stated that if it were being done, it was at a “low level” where average users would not see it.
A Comcast engineer who spoke to the Tech Liberation Front’s Tim Lee confirmed this, stating that “most users wouldn’t even be able to detect the traffic-shaping activities they use without special equipment and training.” On the subject of why the filtering is done networkwide and not just to individual bandwidth hogs: “Comcast (doesn’t) throttle on a user-by-user basis rather than a protocol-by-protocol basis, (as the company is) concerned with the privacy implications of that approach.” That’s right folks, Comcast will sell network wiretaps to the feds for $1,000 a pop, but won’t calculate a user’s total bandwidth per month for “privacy reasons.”
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