Comcast May Face Lawsuits Over BitTorrent Filtering 378
An anonymous reader writes "It's been widely reported that Comcast is engaged in a sneaky form of Internet filtering. The company is terminating its customers' BitTorrent sessions by sending misleading data onto the network. The end result is that instead of targeting key heavy users, Comcast is instead engaged in an all out war against P2P protocols. In an interview with CNET, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann states that Comcast is 'throwing a spanner in the works of the Internet, hoping that this will somehow reduce bandwidth usage overall.' Other lawyers seem to have smelled blood, and are circling in the water. Lohmann reveals that '[The EFF has] already been contacted by attorneys who are considering legal action against Comcast.' Could Comcast be facing a class-action?"
Big and Little answers to this (Score:4, Interesting)
Little question: Does the packet shaping and interdiction violate the agreement that comcast made with users? does it violate upstream agreements with other providers?
the big question isn't likely to be solved by this lawsuit. It is the question we want answered, and quickly, but any lawsuit is likely to stem from some violation of contract erms or some misrepresentation in advertising, not the existential question of Comcast's nature as a common or a private carrier.
The little question might be enlightening, but I doubt it. This policy might have been implemented after consulting the legal depatment and determining that the TOS for Comcast users was draconian and one sided enough to permit this sort of meddling. Alternately, it may have been the result of a business action distinct from legal consulation. Comcast may have been dumb enough to think that their users would be able to notice or test this phenomenon. My money is on a combination of the two notions. comcast probably cleared "packet shaping" in the abstract with legal, but failed to note this wrinkle in the method with them.
they will probably argue in court that they have the right to provide their definition of QOS to buyers, and this requires that they stop "illegal" traffic. They will presumably go through great pains to paint Bittorrent as illegitimate, and justify their actions on that front. They will also bring up the likely fact that residential broadband users have no uptime/QOS clause in their contracts, a fact that will become much more important than the supposed illegality of traffic.
That is where the meat will be. What sort of QOS/uptime/bandwidth promises are made internal and external to the contract. Not very fun stuff, but them's the breaks.
One should hope so (Score:5, Interesting)
One should hope so. See, here's the deal.
If I were on Comcast's Internet service, I would be paying for the ability to communicate with other people to accomplish various legal tasks. And if there is anything to learn in the past few days immediately following the release of Gutsy Gibbon, with Ubuntu.com completely hosed as far as I can tell, there are legitimate, much-needed, legal ways to use peer-to-peer services. If this isn't the fundamental reason for signing up with an Internet Service Provider, to be able to communicate with other computers, what is?
If they had told me up front that they would be resetting peer-to-peer connections, I might be mad, but at least I'd know it up front and could choose to sign up with a service that doesn't do so. If these were technical problems that forced their actions as a resolution, then I might agree that taking necessary action to restore service is a Good Thing. If there really were no legitimate uses for peer-to-peer networks, as the RIAA and MPAA would have everyone believe, then I would still disagree, but at least I would understand.
As it is, though, none of those things are true. Comcast is still denying that they are deliberately causing connections to fail, in spite of the incontrovertible proof that has been offered, and that only after Comcast said nothing at all to their customers for... well... we don't know how long. As it is, it's not in response to connections being down, it was planned out and implemented while nothing was broken in response to some hypothetical situation that might arise. In fact, in having problems with Lotus Notes, Comcast has actually broken something else that was working before in order to fix a problem that didn't exist to begin with!
In short, if I were on Comcast's Internet service, I would be paying them to deliver network packets, that's all. At best, Comcast has engaged in an egregious breach of contract by deliberately interfering with my ability to get packets from A to B. At worst, they are guilty of deliberately and secretly impersonating someone they're not, and if I'm not mistaken, that's a crime. They might be lucky if they can get out of this with just a class action lawsuit.
I'm not on Comcast's Internet service, thank goodness, although I am on AT&T's, and believe me, it's not much better. All of this stupidity just makes me long even more for more competition in this space for something else to come along. I never that I'd see the day when, "We won't interfere with your Internet connection!" would actually become a selling point, yet here we are.
If I can indulge in a bit of tinfoil-hattishness, it really makes me wonder. The RIAA and MPAA are a huge media creation conglomerate. As mentioned, they hate, HATE, HATE peer-to-peer software, even with all of its legitimate uses. As some of you may know, Comcast is more than just an Internet service provider, they also happen to be the largest media provider company, and they're facing increased competition from telcos and satellite providers. Who wants to bet that Comcast has been either paid off or offered sweet deals on media content in trade for pushing the RIAA's and MPAA's agenda of controlling what applications can and can't be used on the Internet?
Something to think about...
This was The Straw... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone is so lucky, I read so many posts in other threads saying that Comcast is their only option for broadband. Hopefully that will change for them. I have a friend in a rural area who was able to sign up for sprint wireless broadband, because comcast wont run their cable 20 feet across the road to his house. The only issue with the sprint connection is it is not incredibly reliable, but for the most part his link stays up while he is using it.
UnFair thee well, Comcast...
Pirillo (Score:4, Interesting)
Turn on encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
I turned it on yesterday and am getting unheard of download speeds: over a 1000 kB/sec. in some cases. I've never seen speeds that high. I use Comcast. And my uploads are getting better so my ratio doesn't ban me from my favorite site.
(Just for linux iso's of course.)
Re:Comcast (Score:4, Interesting)
I disagree. I'm paying them to transport my traffic. Granted, I don't have an SLA, but even without an SLA I have the right to expect best-effort delivery. Sending me forged packets to trick my client into dropping connections doesn't seem like "best-effort".
In lieu of upgrading their network (god forbid they invest some of that money they are making back into the infrastructure), perhaps they should look at some sort of traffic shaping scheme? Prioritize VOIP, ssh, telnet, gaming, etc, etc, packets over large downloads (ftp or http) or bittorrent, which get best effort delivery. That would be fair to everyone concerned and even if they deployed it nationwide it would only come into play on nodes that are overloaded. I've never seen my node overload, probably because I live in a neighborhood full of old people, so for people in neighborhoods like me it wouldn't even come into play. For people in neighborhoods full of script kiddies they'd get better latency on interactive stuff, while the script kiddies wouldn't lose that much bandwidth overall (how much does VOIP or ssh take?).
Bittorrent is obviously the heavy hitter, but if the service providers think it's their only problem they are going to be rudely surprised in a few years. Recall the story about The Daily Show putting all their archives online? I blew through 600 megs of bandwidth in about half an hour messing around on that site. What will happen when video becomes even more popular then it is today? Will they adopt the Verizon Wireless solution of banning such activity or will they actually (*gasp*) invest in some upgrades?
Re:ZOMG!! Squeal!! (Score:2, Interesting)
I was just thinking how much I don't miss Comcast. Even though DSL isn't 6 or 60 Megs up/down like I would expect from a Utopia [utopianet.org] connection, at least I don't have to deal with Comcast's Frankenstein behaviour.
Personally I hope as a nation we consider the Internet "Important" to our economic future. If so then why are we not building a National Infrastructure as proposed by Clinton/Gore int he 90's? I'm talking about NII. From what I'm reading, we already paid for it in taxes over the last decade plus.
And don't get me started over Comcast terminating it's customers for "Using the Internet too much". That's just plain stupid. No limits but don't over use the service you are paying for. And how much is acceptable and what is not?
Yeah, I've read their AUP/TOS and you know what. Even the two lawyers I've spoken to couldn't make heads/tails of it. It's that screwed up.
Anyway, we need to contact our local city council, Mayors, State and Federal politicians about this problem. Either the internet is important or it isn't.
I'm taking a vacation day this Thursday to attend a subcommittee [utah.gov] meeting discussing building the Utopia Infrastructure here in Utah. I sure hope comcast sends someone there. I'd love to hear and respond to his bull.
more than 5 users (Score:2, Interesting)
and there are much more than 5 users. Basically all linux distros are now hosted via torrents, and virtually everything VMware hosts for virtual appliances. Its a lot more than 5 users. That isnt even remotely the point however. They are violating a contract, invading your privacy and technically they are misrepresenting themselves willfully as well.
It would be one thing if they were at least only doing this to people who were the bandwidth pigs first, or that and were sending notices. but they are just doing it in blanket form.
and for you morons out there who still dont get it, two wrongs dont make a right. a protocol is a protocol, do you ban cdr drives because you can duplicate a cd with it? honestly from a non commercial usage standpoint what does anyone ever do with a standalone cd duplicator do?
Re:ZOMG!! Squeal!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:more than 5 users (Score:2, Interesting)
ISPs block things all the time (try getting the Windows SMB port through most ISPs or port 80, 25, etc...) and not a single time has the court struck that down. Seems the precedent shows that its fine for an ISP to do things like this. Some even redirect web traffic to their own proxy servers, again, without legal issue.
Now if you had a business class connection, which guaranteed things like port availability for hosting servers, then you might have something to sue over.
New P2P lawsuit defense: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does AJAX smell like BitTorrent? (Score:3, Interesting)