p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Comcast has been given 30 days to comply with a Federal Communications Commission order to cease its traffic throttling actions aimed at P2P file sharers.

Following complaints by Net neutrality advocacy group Free Press, Comcast, America’s largest cable company, should be punished for violating principles that guarantee customers open access to the Net, said FCC chairman Kevin Martin recently.

“Carefully limited measures” Comcast takes to, “manage traffic” on its broadband network are “reasonable,” company spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said. Theyre part of its strategy to, “ensure all customers receive quality service”.

But time’s up, says the FCC in a lengthy document.

The 11-point introduction leads off with »»»

We consider whether Comcast, a provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines, may selectively target and interfere with connections of peer-to peer (P2P) applications under the facts of this case. Although Comcast asserts that its conduct is necessary to ease network congestion, we conclude that the company’s discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet and does not constitute reasonable network management.

Moreover, Comcast’s failure to disclose the company’s practice to its customers has compounded the harm.

Accordingly, we institute a plan that will bring Comcast’s unreasonable conduct to an end.

In particular, we require Comcast within 30 days to disclose the details of their unreasonable network management practices, submit a compliance plan describing how it intends to stop these unreasonable management practices by the end of the year, and disclose to both the Commission and the public the details of the network management practices that it intends to deploy following termination of its current practices.

It goes on »»»

 2. This Order addresses whether it is a reasonable network management practice for Comcast to interfere with its customers’ use of peer-to-peer networking applications, including those that use the BitTorrent protocol. Before we address the specific facts in this case, we explain what BitTorrent does
and how Comcast’s practice affects Internet users.

3. When an Internet user opens a webpage, sends an email, or shares a document with a colleague, the user’s computer usually establishes a connection with another computer (such as a server or another end user’s computer) using, for example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). For certain applications to work properly, that connection must be continuous and reliable. Computers linked via a TCP connection monitor that connection to ensure that packets of data sent from one user to the other over the connection “arrive in sequence and without error,” at least from the perspective of the receiving computer. If either computer detects that “something seriously wrong has happened within the network,” it sends a “reset packet” or “RST packet” to the other, signaling that the current connection should be terminated and a new connection established “if reliable communication is to continue.”

4. BitTorrent is an open-source, peer-to-peer networking protocol that has become increasingly popular among Internet users in recent years. Unlike traditional methods of file sharing, which typically require establishing a single TCP connection between a user’s computer and a single server, BitTorrent employs a decentralized distribution model: Each computer in a BitTorrent “swarm” is able to download content from the other computers in the swarm, and in turn each computer also makes available content for those same peers to download, all via TCP connections. Furthermore, a computer can download different portions of the same content from multiple computers simultaneously, with each computer providing a different portion of the same content. (For example, a computer could obtain different portions of a video file from several different other computers in the swarm.) BitTorrent thus harnesses the numerous individual Internet connections maintained by its users, rather than relying on a single, central pipeline, to distribute large files “cheaply and quickly,” and the efficiency of that peer-to-peer network is dependent directly on Internet users’ ability to establish TCP connections for both downloading and uploading content. Although once relegated to serving, in most cases, the savviest Internet users with unsavory or even unlawful purposes, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies, such as Gnutella, have entered the mainstream. New online content distributors, such as Vuze, Inc., rely on BitTorrent to distribute video programming to millions of online viewers legally, as do several established distributors such as CBS, Twentieth Century Fox, and Sports Illustrated.

5. Peer-to-peer applications, including those relying on BitTorrent, have become a competitive threat to cable operators such as Comcast because Internet users have the opportunity to view high-quality video with BitTorrent that they might otherwise watch (and pay for) on cable television. Such video distribution poses a particular competitive threat to Comcast’s video-on-demand (”VOD”) service. “VOD . . . operates much like online video, where Internet users can select and download or stream any available program without a schedule and watch it any time, generally with the ability to fast-forward, rewind, or pause the programming.” Comcast has recently placed a significant emphasis on expanding its VOD business, and its VOD revenues have experienced robust growth. Moreover, Comcast has “begun incorporating its VOD content online through sites competing directly with BitTorrent protocol sites.”

6. Comcast subscribers began to notice that they had problems using BitTorrent and similar technologies over their Comcast broadband connections. Last year, their complaints began to receive widespread attention in the press. When first confronted with these press reports, Comcast — the nation’s second largest provider of broadband Internet access services— misleadingly disclaimed any responsibility for the customers’ problems. For example, a Comcast spokesman stated: “We’re not blocking any access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic.” Rather, he indicated that Comcast’s policy was to “pro-actively contact” those customers using what Comcast deemed to be excessive bandwidth “via phone to work with them and address the issue or help them select a more appropriate commercial-grade Comcast product.”
7. The Associated Press (AP) subsequently conducted several nationwide tests to investigate the allegations that Comcast was interfering with its customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications, including BitTorrent. On October 17, 2007, the AP reported the results of these tests: It concluded that Comcast “actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.” “Comcast’s interference affects all types of content, meaning that, for instance, an independent movie producer who wanted to distribute his work using BitTorrent and his Comcast connection could find that difficult or impossible.” The AP found that Comcast’s conduct had a “drastic effect . . . on one type of traffic— in some cases blocking it rather than slowing it down.”

8. AP also concluded that “the method used” by Comcast was “difficult to circumvent and involves [Comcast] falsifying network traffic.” Specifically, “when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user” via a TCP connection, Comcast’s servers (through which its users’ packets of data must pass) send to each user’s computer an RST packet “that looks like it comes from the other [user’s] computer” and terminates the connection. One month after the AP’s report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published the results of its own testing and similarly concluded that Comcast was selectively targeting customers who uploaded files using BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer protocols. Like AP, EFF also found examples where the Comcast’s “packet forgery prevent[ed] the transfer of data.”

9. Following these tests, Comcast changed its account and admitted that it targets peer-to-peer traffic for interference. Specifically, Comcast asserted that “when P2P unidirectional upload sessions . . . reach a predetermined congestion threshold in a particular neighborhood,” Comcast’s network “issues instructions called ‘reset packets.’” Comcast further claimed that it sent RST packets to peer-to-peer TCP connections being used to upload content until the traffic “in the neighborhood drops below the predetermined level.” In all, Comcast claimed that it sent RST packet “only during periods of peak
network congestion” and “only . . . during periods of heavy network traffic.” Evidence in the record, however, contradicts this claim. One Comcast customer, for example, conducted numerous tests and reported that the level of interference with his use of peer-to-peer applications was approximately equal, “regardless of the time of day or night, regardless of the day of the week, and [despite] the presumable differences in network congestion during prime time and non-prime time hours of use.” No matter the time of the test, all of the customer’s Gnutella upload requests were thwarted and approximately 40% of all his BitTorrent established upload connections were reset. In short, the customer concluded that for Comcast’s claim of neighborhood-specific, congestion-targeted interference to be accurate, “my neighborhood would have to be under the same amount of congestion for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.” Confronted with this and other evidence, Comcast changed its story yet again, and admitted that its “current P2P management is triggered . . . regardless of the level of overall network congestion at th[e] time, and regardless of the time of day.”

10. On November 1, 2007, Free Press filed with the Commission a complaint against Comcast and asked the Commission to declare “that an Internet service provider violates the [Commission’s] Internet Policy Statement when it intentionally degrades a targeted Internet application.” Thereafter, over twenty thousand Americans similarly complained of “Comcast’s blatant and deceptive blocking of peer-to-peer communications” and requested the Commission to “take immediate action to put an abrupt end to this harmful practice.” On January 11, 2008, the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau requested a response from Comcast, and Comcast responded two weeks later.

11. Free Press also filed with the Commission a petition for declaratory ruling asking the Commission to “clarify that an Internet service provider violates the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement when it intentionally degrades a targeted Internet application.” Separately, Vuze, Inc. filed a petition for rulemaking asking the Commission “to adopt reasonable rules that would prevent the network operators from engaging in practices that discriminate against particular Internet applications, content or technologies.” The Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau sought comment on Free Press’s petition and Vuze’s petition on January 14, 2008, and the Commission has received more than 6,500 comments in response. In addition, the Commission held public hearings on the complaint and these petitions at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 25, 2008, and at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California, on April 17, 2008, with testimony from a diverse panel of experts— both technical and legal, industry and academic— along with numerous members of the public.

Click here for the rest of the 67-page document.

And stay tuned

. .Stumble It!

traffic throttling actions - Stop throttling traffic, Comcast ordered, August 1, 2008

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!

Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2814 times