DISQUS

Facebook is a website. It's not the wire.

If your ISP was nuking communications about The Pirate Bay as your packets crossed the wire, then that's one thing.

A website enforcing its draconian rules may be nasty, but its not wiretapping.

--Quote--
There is only one big application out there that a network engineer can legitimately point to as a potential troublemaker - that is unthrottled peer to peer torrent activity. That can absorb whatever bandwidth is thrown to it, if the demand for the shared file is high enough.
--EndQuote--

Hi Philip,

Sure, but that's true of non-P2P uploads as well. There's nothing special about BitTorrent here. Another consideration you mentioned is "unthrottled." Nearly every ISP throttles uploads to a fraction of the download speed. BitTorrent (and every other application) must live within that allocation. Peer-to-peer architecture has no special magic that defeats it; instead, it simply lives within it.

McDowell's comparison of Network Neutrality is the dumbest thing I've heard all week. And while I'm glad that you're smart enough to realize that it probably won't happen, I'm puzzled that you don't explain why.

So I will -- The Fairness Doctrine, if applied on the Internet, would violate Network Neutrality principles!

The network has never cared about the political positions of the senders of packets, and it would violate the neutral behavior of the network if it had to start caring. Today's free marketplace provided by the Internet ensures that no voices get blocked and that access to all voices are ensured to anyone who wants to listen. The fairness doctrine provided for "equal time" on a radio station, regardless if anyone was listening to it. That's not a free market, and McDowell definitely knows the difference.

The Comcast case was about "deregulating" the Internet -- Oh, it wasn't regulated by the government, this was actually worse -- It was being regulated by a monopoly.

C'mon TLF -- what was really going on here? I didn't see his presentation, and so I don't really know for myself. But I'm thinking that a speech at the Heritage Foundation, which is a well-respected source especially popular with fans of AM talk-radio (as I am), which has had unsurpassed analysis of how our tax money gets spent -- this was the perfect place for McDowell to try and drive a wedge between bloogers on NN by bringing up the long-dead Fairness Doctrine to strike fear in those who generally support the idea of a free and open Internet.

Be skeptical -- we fought (and won) a case to keep Comcast from regulating the global Internet. Do you think we did that because we want OUR (or any) government to regulate it, instead?

Thanks

Robb Topolski

A really good service for doing this is at http://www.changedetection.com/

--Robb

Great Job, Phil!! Keep 'em coming.

Hi Phil,

That excuse is lame but are they saying that this is a big misunderstanding or are the caps going to apply anyway?

Robb Topolski
(on VZ, fortunately)

This is a call for regulation -- of one kind or another. Either create regulation to bring healthy, sensible competition to Broadband ...or... create regulation mandating Network Neutrality. Choose your nightmare, but one of them HAS to be done.

"But in this case, it turns out that action was well underway before the issue went before the FCC."

"Well underway" is a bit generous. Even with Comcast CTO Tony Werner reportedly acting as an adviser to BitTorrent Inc. (a relationship I cannot find disclosed anywhere prior to yesterday's announcement), BitTorrent Inc's learned about the protocol interference in the news.

And let's talk about this P2Peace moment --

I think it’s strange that anyone believes a word that Comcast says. This is the Comcast that:

1.Told the government that they would not degrade traffic in order to convince officials that network neutrality regulations were not needed.

2.Started degrading P2P traffic the very next year, and failed to tell anyone what they were doing.

3.Used a system that utilized forgery, and successfully placed blame on the other peer instead of Comcast.

4.Denied it when caught.

5.Then changed their story when the denials were not believed, but still never came out and said what they were doing.

6.Then they justified their actions by throwing their other Cable-Internet brothers and sisters under the bus with their “they do it too!” defense

7.Then stealthily changed the AUP days before an FCC filing where they referred to the new provisions.

8.When the changed AUP started getting press attention, they stated that a prominent story on Comcast.net alerted millions of visitors of
the change and accused critics of crying "Wolf!" (Google cache proved that nothing alerted users to the changed AUP until the day after the press started asking questions.)

9.Then they packed the Harvard FCC hearing.

And now Comcast, whose shenanigans hit the press only 6 months ago, has generously granted itself another 9 months of continuing to violating IETF Internet Standards, the 2005 FCC Policy Statement, and the rights of its 13.9 million customers!

The Comcast agreement with BitTorrent Inc. isn't worth the paper that it's NOT written on!

Wrong guy -- but okay, I'll still give that one to you -- that was funny. Did George Ou tell you that one?

My test vehicle was De Vinci's notebook and the tests I cooperated in with the EFF was the OpenOffice release.

It was the AP that used the Bible, and I wasn't involved in any of their testing.

I was one of the first to discover and document this issue at dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-Comcast and I want to congratulate all of you on this podcast.

When the AP story broke, I was having major surgery. I'm still recovering. I'm amazed at how big this story has become.

I found myself agreeing with Ed Felton the most. With respect, I felt that Richard Bennett was the most off-course on his opinions and his facts.

As I repeatedly say in the DSLReports message, I personally believe that reasonably managing the passive activity on the network during periods of congestion is okay.

One thing I'd like everyone to know, a development discovered after my first message, which is being missed: My testing shows Comcast is interfering with 40% of my completed connections -- regardless of the time of day, day of week, and presumably the corresponding differences in network load. Furthermore, because these Sandvine devices are installed at each CMTS, they even interfere with connections that never route outside of the Comcast network!

Richard: the SlashDot uber-geeks are incorrect. Most firewalls never use RST on an established connection. Sally Floyd wrote in the fw-wiz mailing list on 09 May 2001 that only 300 sites out of 24000 tested seemingly enforced policy using RST. Most use some other kind of control, several of which she describes in RFC 3360.

As employed, Comcast's P2P management is both damaging and ineffective. It's a perfect example of why their silence on this issue is a Bad Thing(tm).