FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The FCC has officially opened proceedings investigating Comcast's use of Sandvine to send RST packets and 'throttle' P2P connections by disconnecting them. The petitioner, Vuze, Inc. is asking the FCC to rule that Comcast's measures do not constitute 'reasonable network management' per the FCC rules and to forbid Comcast from unreasonably discriminating against lawful Internet applications, content, and technologies. If you want to weigh in on these proceedings, you can use the Electronic Comment Filing System to comment on WC Docket no. 07-52 any time before February 13th."

Slashdot commenting

Getting slashdot users to comment to the FCC, smartest idea EVER.

Re:

Getting slashdot users to comment to the FCC

I was thinking the same thing... I was also trying to decide if the "put-it-in-neutral" dept. was meant for our comments or commentary on the Comcast P2P thing...

Re:Slashdot commenting

I tried. For some reason I lose my connection to the FCC after only a few seconds...

Excellent Use of Slashdot Power

Posting the link to the public comment filing system was an excellent decision. The problem with these "Public" comment periods is that there are very minimal requirements for advertising the opportunity to comment, and too often the only people who know about it are the parties actually involved in the litigation. Slashdot users are (often) some of the most well-informed and affected members of the community with regards to technology issues, and Slashdot editors ought to ensure that they include information about opportunities to make public comments on ongoing regulatory issues whenever possible.

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That would require the editors to actualy read, let alone understand what is written.

Re:Excellent Use of Slashdot Power

Slashdot users are (often) some of the most well-informed and affected members of the community with regards to technology issues

Thanks for the chuckle. You'll want to set your filter to below "+4" sometime; the vast majority of slashdotters are just as uninformed as the rest of the public -- except worse, because we don't /know/ we're just as uninformed.

Re:Excellent Use of Slashdot Power

Slashdot users are (often) some of the most well-informed and affected members of the community with regards to technology issues

You must be n... no, that's too easy. Try reading /. at -1 from time to time, you might reconsider your above statement after that.

Both are correct. We have some of the most well informed, and some of the biggest idiots around. I feel sorry for the FCC since the commenst section isn't moderated. No browsing at +2 for them. :(

If you want to weigh in on these proceedings...

Oh, the trolls are going to have fun with this one.

Re: If you want to weigh in on these proceedings..

Here's a sample of one of the comments

You can tell Comcast is run by niggers because everyone knows niggers like to throttle shit a lot.

amirite

Vuze Inc. = Azureus

For those interested, Vuze Inc. is made up of the developers of Azureus, the open source bit torrent client. These guys obviously have a stake in what's going on because their newer app, Vuze, has deals with some media organizations to serve their content via P2P.

Something really strange when I filled it out

My complaint turned into:

"I am a happy Comcast customer and I love P2P blocking! In fact, I wish they would block everything! Piracy is BAD!"

Think Comcast had something to do with it?

Forging packets = questionable activity

Although Comcast has the right to throttle and manage their network connectivity, forging packets will probably get them in trouble. IANAL

Re:

If that is what they were doing I would be more generous, but they are advertising unlimited high-speed and they are blocking 24/7. If it were just during peak usage periods then I'd consider it network management because I'd be getting unlimited high-spee

Re:Forging packets = questionable activity

The real problem with Comcast isn't that they were throttling traffic, it's that they were completely blocking it. As I understand the issue, they were caught introducing commands to reset the connection into packets as if they had come from the genuine sender. So, not only were they taking it a step further than throttling, but they were, in essence, subversively forging a communication in order to do it.

Deja Vu

These companies are ostensibly throttling bittorent and other P2P services because they eat up too much bandwidth. And rather than improve bandwidth or set up a new pricing structure (abandoning the silly pretense of "unlimited" usage), they are taking a more heavy-handed and secretive approach.

When I though about this, though I got a sense of Deja Vu. I can't remember the particulars, but wasn't there a similar controversy back when people first started using modems over their phone lines? I seem to remember the telcos rasing a stink and saying something like "this was not what the phone lines were intended for, it's eating up too much of our resources" or something to that effect and threatening to sanction or even cut off heavy modem users. Of course, we know how that one turned out, but can you imagine what the world would look like today if they had followed through, cracking down on modem use and crippling the internet before it even got started?

Re:Deja Vu

Streaming and downloadable video and audio are my primary form of entertainment. I also use services to download games. Everything I download is legal - some of it is paid for, and some is made available for free by the content providers. This month, I got the call from Comcast saying that I had to use less bandwidth, or risk being shut off for 12 months. I asked how much I should be using, and they refused to give an answer.

Comcast is discriminating against more than just P2P users. I'd be happy to meet their specified usage limits, if they would specify them, or use a different plan if they would define the limits of each option.

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That's what REALLY pisses me off about these companies. It would be one thing if they would just publicly state their limits and at least allow users the option to pay more for bandwidth. But the fact that they try to advertise these services as "unlimited

Re:Deja Vu

These companies are ostensibly throttling bittorent and other P2P services

No, Comcast was absolutely NOT throttling.

What Comcast was doing was impersonating their customer and sending a fraud "hang up" command to the other end of the connection, and also impersonating the other end of the connection to send a fraudulent "hang up" command to their own customer, killing the connection from both ends.

US Law Computer Fraud and Abuse act [cornell.edu]
TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 47 Section 1030 Paragraph (a)(5)(A)(i)
[Whoever] knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
Paragraph(a)(5)(B)(i)
loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period (and, for purposes of an investigation, prosecution, or other proceeding brought by the United States only, loss resulting from a related course of conduct affecting 1 or more other protected computers) aggregating at least $5,000 in value;

And where Paragraph (e)(8) defines:
the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information;

Comcast was in fact knowingly transmitting fraudulent commands with the intent and effect of "impairing the availability of data", and considering that they did so to a VAST customer base it trivially exceeded an "aggregate value of $5000" even on the most conservative per-customer estimate valuation.

As far as I can Comcast hit a bullseye on an explicit criminal statute. Forget about FCC diddling over whether this was or was not "reasonable network management", as far as I can tell this should be a damn CRIMINAL case.

-

And monkeys might fly out of my butt...

FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation

Why, so they can ignore it again?

The public who understands it, opposes it. The rest of the public has no clue what they even asked (though would oppose it if they did). And the FCC will still side with the three comments from guys like Rupert Murdoch.

Telling Slashdot to Comment is a bad idea...

Now, let's be honest. We get some...insightful...commentary posted here on the site, so I can only imagine what comments submitted to the FCC are going to read like.

Slashdot users have been known to be confrontational at times, and I can't imagine that we will be doing our case any good by submitting nasty, derogatory comments to the FCC. I'm also with the conspiracy theorists that Comcast could just block the connections to that FCC page with some unfortunate "network packet loss" so keep people from submitting comments.

I guess we're screwed either way, since I doubt the FCC will do anything meaningful once Congress finishes neutering them after their "SuddenOutbreakOfCommonSense".

Re:Telling Slashdot to Comment is a bad idea...

You're absolutely right, we're in a lose/lose situation. The FCC might decide the whole thing is garbage, which it is, and threaten some action against Comcast. Congress, who coincidentally get a lot of money from the entertainment industry, might move to block them. The entertainment industry, who coincidentally believe they're losing a lot of money due to teh evilz of bit torrents, will be happy and might see if other carriers are willing to do the same thing.

The best hope to get this stopped early is for people with a large sustained user base to get the legitimate uses of bit torrent out in the open and in the public eye. Vuze, Blizzard, and Bit Torrent (obviously) have a pretty big stake in the whole thing.

Some of these comments are great!

I actually looked up some of the comments filed so far and it looks like the FCC needs to employ a spam filter of some sort.

Apparently the FCC is in need of purchasing some new life insurance: Submitted Comment [fcc.gov]

They also need to buy some new cell phones from Hong Kong!: Submitted Comment [fcc.gov]

Luckily, there are a few good comments such as this set of form letters (read: petition) found here: Submitted Comment [fcc.gov]

Ok, there are a few good comments there at least, I like this Rome analogy here: Submitted Comment [fcc.gov]

Kevin Martin has selective attention disorder

Big money/Corporations = Kevin Martin is all ears
Concerned citizens = Kevin Martin hears nothing

If Kevin Martin can ignore the public outrage about relaxing media ownership rules that he witnessed personally at several town hall meetings, he'll have no trouble ignoring a bunch of public comments on the internet. He's a corporate lapdog. This Comcast "investigation" is merely a formality and a complete joke.

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Why don't they just ask for one billion, gagillion, fafillion, shabolubalu million illion yillion...yen?

What's that these days? $1,000? ;-)

Re:What about other blocked traffic?

blocking a port is somewhat different from packet sniffing and insertion. In the port 25 case, they ISP isn't really blocking it, just blocking out of network access - port 25 is reserved for the ISP s email servers. There is some justification for it, convenience of their users (the vast majority of whom use the ISP's mail servers) and some basic spam blocking. For the minority, it's trivial to open up a different port (587 or 2525 maybe?) for email and use that - it's done all the time. Inserting/blocking and falsifying packets is something else entirely. The only justification is that the ISP wants to throttle back traffic, that isn't in favor of an in-network service that most of the ISP's clients would prefer to use, and, since Comcast enjoys monopoly status in some areas, there isn't a way for the client to vote with their feet.