Comcast blocks bittorrent ... crosses the line?

[toadspittle]

The AP alleges that Comcast is not observing net neutrality. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/) No shocker there. I think most people expect there to be some sort of network load balancing (or limiting, as it were) going on to ensure that all customers have a fair shot at the available bandwidth.

However, Comcast is not merely slowing down transfer speeds for high-volume users—which, to my mind, would not be unfair. They are, instead, actively disconnecting (some) bittorent users:

Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. **But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. **If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

This just makes me verrrry uneasy. I’m OK with my ISP giving me slower upload speeds if they perceive me as using more than my fair share of bandwidth. But I think that actively disconnecting the transfer—using a deceptive message that appears to originate from somewhere else!—is going too far.

Turning down the water pressure is one thing. But analyzing my communications and then posing as someone else to shut them down … very creepy.

Thoughts?

[E-Sabbath]

A: The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

B: WoW uses Bittorrent to patch things.

Conclusion: Comcast has just pissed off many customers.

[Whack-a-Mole]

I agree it is bogus but it is easily gotten around.

Use a client that encrypts the data stream (Azureus, uTorrent for instance). With the stream encrypted the ISP cannot analyze what it is you are doing to make a decision to limit or block you.

Personally I am far more worried about the RIAA buying up the likes of Bit Torrent and uTorrent but that is another thread I guess.

[Khadaji]

Comcast sucks in so very many ways. This is just one more of them.

I don’t use any of the services that they are censoring, but I still think they crossed a line.

[Rysto]

Well, I expect to get reamed for this but I’m going to offer a (partial) defence of this kind of thing: ISPs pull this kind of stuff(and believe me, using this type of technology is hardly limited to Comcast) because they really have no other choice. Unlimited P2P breaks the internet because there is no bound to the amount of bandwidth a single P2P transfer will take. This makes it impossible for an ISP to provision their network appropriately, because however much bandwidth they provide, P2P apps will consume it all. This creates a real problem for latency-sensitive apps like online gaming and VoIP. With P2P apps “clogging the tubes”, as it were, latency goes way up and customers become unhappy. So no matter what Comcast does they’re going to make people unhappy, and they’ve chosen to degrade the performance of certain classes of applications to allow other classes of applications to work on their network. It’s a sensitive balance and believe me, whatever people seem to think, ISPs are not in the business of pissing off customers for no reason.

[Rysto]

To be honest, though, I’m frankly shocked that it took people so long to catch on to this trick.

[E-Sabbath]

Yes, but doing the equivalent of wire fraud is probably not a really great idea.

Especially if it’s interstate. And yes, Comcast is representing themselves as a person, Customer Joe Smith, to Non-Customer Joe Schmoe. That’s how it works.

[Rysto]

It’s not wire fraud. From 18 U.S.C. § 1343

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

Comcast isn’t defrauding anybody of any property.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Rysto

Well, I expect to get reamed for this but I’m going to offer a (partial) defence of this kind of thing: ISPs pull this kind of stuff(and believe me, using this type of technology is hardly limited to Comcast) because they really have no other choice. Unlimited P2P breaks the internet because there is no bound to the amount of bandwidth a single P2P transfer will take. This makes it impossible for an ISP to provision their network appropriately, because however much bandwidth they provide, P2P apps will consume it all.

I would like to see statistics on how much bandwidth torrents actually take up. The likes of Kazaa were much more popular in the past and they did not jump on those. Torrents are a semi-weird creature to use and many users simply will not bother because of that.

Additionally, if the ISP sells me “up to” 5 Mb/s of bandwidth then tells me later that I cannot really have that I think that is bogus. As long as I do not do much with my connection they are fine but as soon as I actually use the bandwidth I paid for they stop me?

Back to the bandwidth issue I think you’ll find most bandwidth is taken up by e-mail and e-mail these days is comprised largely of spam. And for that it is not just bandwidth but also storage. If the ISP REALLY wanted to free up bandwidth and save money they would seek to limit spam.

[Rysto]

Spam? Not on your life. P2P takes about 80% of the uplink and 60-80% of the downlink. I’ll try to find a cite. SMTP is a mere drop in the bucket.

[Digital_Stimulus]

@toadspittle

The AP alleges that Comcast is not observing net neutrality.

The AP does allege that. And therein lies a problem that muddies the issue: Net neutrality is not the same as quality of service. From the article:

@MSNBC

Most of the debate around the issue has centered on tentative plans, now postponed, by large Internet carriers to offer preferential treatment of traffic from certain content providers for a fee.

Limiting all bittorrent traffic is an example of QoS but not net neutrality; blocking all bittorrent traffic from Google but not from Comcast (should Google and/or Comcast serve bittorrent files) might be an example of QoS, but definitely violates the principle of net neutrality.

IMHO, sending an RST packet is essentially a “man in the middle” attack, and deserves prosecution under the current laws against hacking.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Rysto

Spam? Not on your life. P2P takes about 80% of the uplink and 60-80% of the downlink. I’ll try to find a cite. SMTP is a mere drop in the bucket.

I’m not talking about YOUR bandwidth usage. I am talking about the overall traffic at the ISP. You may be using 80% of your download for P2P but 98% of the ISP’s customers are not using P2P. But they are all getting e-mail. Since we are talking about this from the perspective of Comcast that is the relevant number.

[LilShieste]

@Rysto

It’s not wire fraud. From 18 U.S.C. § 1343

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

Comcast isn’t defrauding anybody of any property.

IANAL, but I think the “or” right before the part about obtaining money or property is important. They’re not obtaining money or property, but they have devised “a scheme or artifice to defraud”.
LilShieste

[Rysto]

@Whack-a-Mole

I’m not talking about YOUR bandwidth usage. I am talking about the overall traffic at the ISP. You may be using 80% of your download for P2P but 98% of the ISP’s customers are not using P2P. But they are all getting e-mail. Since we are talking about this from the perspective of Comcast that is the relevant number.

I don’t use P2P myself, actually. And what I’m telling you is that at basically any ISP in the world, about 70% of total bandwidth usage goes to P2P traffic. More at places that don’t use some kind of solution to limit P2P. You exaggerate some with your 98% of customers don’t use P2P but you have hit on an essential truth – a tiny percentage of an ISP’s customers use up an overwhelming majority of the bandwidth.

[scotandrsn]

@toadspittle

… But analyzing my communications and then posing as someone else to shut them down … very creepy.

Well, that’s what’s really at the heart of the net neutrality issue, and the one that Tim Berners-Lee mentions every time he speaks or writes about the subject.

On the surface, it does not necessarily seem entirely unreasonable, for example, that net customers who want to watch YouTube a lot want higher bandwidth, and the companies providing that bandwidth ought to be able to get compensated.

But every piece of information on the internet is broken up into chunks and sent in packets saying where it’s coming from and where it’s going. It’s like writing a long letter and sending each page in a sequentially numbered envelope.

Now, there could be a lot of traffic between your IP address and YouTube’s. You could be posting a comment, getting an e-mail from someone who works there, watching a video, etc. If the ISP wants to charge more for streaming video, though, that means they would have to look at the contents of the packets and decide who needed to get charged more.

It would be like if a new private postal service opened up, and instead of operating the way the USPS does, they set up a monthly fee, the payment of which allows you to send a certain amount of mail through them, perhaps unlimited. Then, one day, they say, “hey, we noticed this one letter contains a check, and due to the increased liability of transporting funds, that costs extra.”

The issue is not whether the postal company has a right to figure out a way to compensate themselves for taking on something they perceive as extra burden, the issue is, what the fuck are you opening my mail for when I pay you just to deliver it?

In the case at hand, ComCast is not just delivering internet packets, which is what their customers pay them to do, but looking into their contents and making decisions about them, something they are not paid to do.

This shit is only going to increase since last month’s Justice department filing dismissing the notion of net neutrality.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Ha! This is funny. Seems we could both cite each other out the door.

Today, CacheLogic estimates that P2P applications consume between 60 percent and 80 percent of capacity on consumer ISP networks.

SOURCE: P2P Fuels Global Bandwidth Binge | WIRED

And then…

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a new body that aims to measure and reduce spam, released its first report which estimates 80 percent of all Internet traffic today is comprised of abusive email.

SOURCE: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3592386

Seems we are both right…math be damned!

[Justin_Bailey]

@Whack-a-Mole

I’m not talking about YOUR bandwidth usage. I am talking about the overall traffic at the ISP. You may be using 80% of your download for P2P but 98% of the ISP’s customers are not using P2P. But they are all getting e-mail. Since we are talking about this from the perspective of Comcast that is the relevant number.

ReadWrite

Email accounts for less than 10% of all bandwidth whereas P2P counts for the biggest chunk at about 50%.

I can’t fault Comcast for this at all. When everyone pays the same price, you want to please the most people you can, not the heaviest users (who of course, whine the loudest).

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Justin_Bailey

Email accounts for less than 10% of all bandwidth whereas P2P counts for the biggest chunk at about 50%.

We can do this all day:

According to data released this week by Ellacoya Networks, YouTube now accounts for 10 percent of all Internet traffic, and 20 percent of all HTTP traffic.

<snip>

The study has gotten attention because it finds that P2P traffic is no longer the largest component of Internet traffic.

SOURCE: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/Jun/22/youtube_10_percent_of_all_internet_traffic.html

Then consider what sites like MySpace (very video/graphic/audio intensive) add to it as well as the likes of iTunes. Besides YouTube add in other video hosting sites there as well (not as big as YouTube but in aggregate add up).

[Rysto]

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a new body that aims to measure and reduce spam, released its first report which estimates 80 percent of all Internet traffic today is comprised of abusive email.

SOURCE: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3592386

I’ll bet that they get this number by the number of different TCP connections. A P2P TCP connection lasts a very long time, so there are relatively fewer. From the ISP’s point of view, it’s the bandwidth consumption that matters, not the number of distinct connections.

[Rysto]

Ellacoya, frankly, is full of shit. They’re claiming that they can detect 99% of all internet traffic correctly – including encrypted traffic. Not a chance.