Groups Seek Stop to Comcast Net Meddling
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars on Thursday formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with its subscribers’ file sharing.
Two of the groups are also asking the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
The petitions will be the first real test of the FCC’s stance on “Net Neutrality,” the long-standing principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a policy supporting the concept but its position hasn’t been tested in a real-world case.
Last month, The Associated Press reported that Comcast hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The AP’s tests confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with some file-sharing applications.
Comcast is the country’s largest cable company and has 12.9 million Internet subscribers, making it the second-largest Internet service provider.
Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged last week that it was “delaying” some of the traffic between computers that share files.
In practice, the company blocks requests from users who are trying to retrieve files from a Comcast subscriber’s computer for a period of time. But it eventually lets the requests through if they are repeated.
In one AP test, a request went through after 10 minutes of trying. The technology does not directly affect downloads of BitTorrent files by Comcast subscribers, only uploads.
Comcast has said the interference is intended to improve the Internet experience for all its subscribers, noting that a relatively small number of file sharers is enough to slow down its network.
In response to the filings, David Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, said that the FCC’s policies recognize that ISPs need to manage the traffic on their networks.
But if other ISPs follow in Comcast’s footsteps, file sharing would essentially crawl to a halt. While the technology is a popular way to illegally share copyright movies and music, legal uses are proliferating, particularly in movie distribution.
“They’re blocking an innovative application that could be a competitor to cable TV,” said Marvin Ammori, general counsel at Free Press, one of the advocacy groups behind the petition to the FCC.
The petition asks the commission to immediately declare that Comcast is violating the FCC’s policy. The co-signers are Consumer Federation of America; Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports; Media Access Project; Public Knowledge; and professors at the Internet practices of the Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools.
Free Press and Public Knowledge are separately filing a formal complaint that asks the FCC to demand a “forfeiture” from Comcast of $195,000 per affected subscriber.
The number is based on the statutory maximum of $97,500 for a single continuing violation, doubled by what the groups see as deception on the company’s part. Comcast kept its practice secret until publicized by the AP, saying that it couldn’t divulge the inner workings of its network for security reasons.
Its filtering technique also involves the company forging network messages so that they appear to come from subscriber and non-subscriber computers.
The complaint includes affidavits from three Comcast subscribers who say they have been affected by Comcast’s interference. The complaint asks the FCC to determine the total number of affected subscribers.
It’s not clear how quickly the FCC would act on the filings.
“The FCC should be aggressively reviewing these cases because they go to ensuring the freedom and openness of the Internet which is so vital to our communications future and to our civic dialogue,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in a statement.
Comcast’s Cohen noted that the FCC’s policy statement, which says that consumers are allowed to run the Internet applications of their choice, makes that “subject to reasonable network management” by ISPs.
“If Comcast is right - that what it’s doing meets the policy statement - then anyone can start blocking BitTorrent tomorrow,” Ammori said.
A ruling against Comcast could cause problems for other Internet service providers. Many of them acknowledge managing traffic to improve flow, which likely includes slowing down file-sharing traffic by means less drastic than Comcast’s.
The Net Neutrality debate erupted in 2005, when the FCC abolished the obligation of providers of Internet service via digital subscriber lines, or DSL, to carry all traffic nondiscriminately (that obligation had been abolished for cable broadband in 2002). The obligation was replaced with the policy statement.
Phone companies started suggesting that they would like to be able to charge large Web companies more for guaranteed delivery of their traffic as a way to finance the build-out of their networks.
Web anchors like Google Inc. and Amazon Inc., joined by consumer groups, opposed the notion, saying it would make Internet service providers the toll keepers of the Internet and enable them to stifle competition and innovation.
The debate was stilled when AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to shelve their plans temporarily to get their respective plans to acquire BellSouth and MCI approved by the FCC.
Ammori said it appeared that the “nightmare scenario” portrayed by Net Neutrality proponents like his own group, Free Press, had been averted.
“Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Comcast is doing exactly what we most feared … secretly degrading an application,” Ammori said. “We didn’t expect the first violation to be so blatant.”
On the Net:
© 2007 Associated Press
I experience this blockage on a regular basis with comcast, but thought it was my hardware causing the problem. Guess not. Funny because I distinctly remember signing up for their “unlimited” plan. Guess unlimited really meant “unlimited interference”. I’ve also heard a number of complaint on engadget about people having caps placed on the amount of megabytes they are allowed to upload and download while on an unlimited subscription.
What’s worse is, almost no one has a better network for the same price as Comcast in my area. Horray for monopolies!
Why should anyone expect the FCC to be for the people when it is long time that it were ABOLISHED as it has been nothing but a tool being used by the neocons to burn and shred the Constitution ?!?!? Besides, the FCC is currently being headed by corporate crooks in charge !
A side issue illustrated in this article is that the mainstream media typically fails to clearly distinguish how things serve the public interests and how things serve private interests. So the people are confused and unable to effectively support policies that serve the public interests. This is not a surprising result - the private interests want the public interests to go away, and confusing the public is an effective strategy to achieve private advantage.
Doing away with Network Neutrality is way more sinister than just blocking a few bitTorrents… Since ISPs are quickly becoming conglomerated into a few companies, soon free speech on the internet could be a thing of the past… It’s a fairly simple process to put filtering on their routers to look for certain keywords and block content that doesn’t meet their “standards”. You can kiss sites like CommonDreams goodbye when that happens… It’s just another step in the outlawing of dissent and free-thought.
I have dial up. My only dsl option is Centurytel. They have a monopoly on all high speed internet here. There is no cable. They want $25 a month for 256k. They have temporary offers for $20..
My 56k modem never gets above 32k as it passes through Centurytel phone lines to get to a local dial up provider. I also have a very noisy phone line and frequent dropped calls for a land line at $35 a month.
thanks for the deregulation it is really working here!
COMCAST FAILS THE LAUGH TEST ON NET NEUTRALITY
by Barry Payne, Economist, Ph.D. ex-FCC staff bbpayne@earthlink.net
Controlling BitTorrent to “improve” network flow?
The way electric utilities interrupt customers on an “interruptible rate” to prevent an outage to customers on the “firm rate”?
If electric utilities did what Comcast is doing, they’d be cutting off or delaying the flow of electricity to FIRM customers BY TYPE OF USE, i.e., lighting, electric motors, computers and hair dryers, not by the NEUTRAL use of kilowatts and kilowatt-hours the way they do now, independent of how the electricity is used.
Comcast is controlling network flow through SELECTIVE, IDENTIFIABLE CONTENT. If Comcast were NEUTRALLY controlling PEAK NETWORK USE to avoid outages or slowdowns to other customers, it would be controlling KILO-BYTES AND KILO-BYTE SECONDS, not SPECIFIC CONTENT.
For example, the use of BitTorrent during peak periods could equal 10,000 emails, 3,000 web page connections or 4 digital movies in terms of IDENTICAL peak use imposed on the network. Each source could be equally (neutrally) responsible for the peak congestion.
Picking and choosing among those sources for delay or cutoff by Comcast based on CONTENT is non-neutral discrimination. For example, a traffic jam could be alleviated by preventing entry of say 200 buses, 200 trucks or 600 cars, where any of the three take up the same amount of road space to cause the same amount of congestion.
Comcast should not be making these choices among internet use content any more than a traffic cop should be deciding whether one bus or one truck causes more congestion than three cars - if there was a “congestion fee”, the bus and the truck should be assessed three times that of a car as a “neutral” control of traffic.
Instead, Comcast and other facility-based broadband providers are posturing to force customers into a newly created “fast-lane everything” package with much higher prices, perhaps double or triple the price for what customers get now. Degraded quality at lower speeds would be used to force customers into the high-price package.
Achieving such market power outcomes requires that the current conditions of net neutrality, in place by default, be undermined and abandoned to whatever degree necessary. That’s why this case is important - it will tend to set a standard for net neutrality going forward absent any hard laws or FCC rules on the issue.
Comcast should be required to show its peak network capacity cannot be met. It should be forced to cease overselling network capacity along with vague language designed to allow it to control delays, cutoffs, pricing and content at will.
If Comcast threatens that it will not maintain maintenance or buildout of the network or to impose discriminatory pricing unless net neutrality is abandoned, its monopoly franchises should be suspended and considered for competitive buyout and takeover by a new provider under conditions of net neutrality.
If Comcast insists that a “fast-lane” is necessary to alleviate congestion, it should be allowed to provide one under the condition that existing broadband capacity and access remains undisturbed and overhauled with clear pricing and capacity maximums available to end users.