Comcast Sued Again over P2P Throttling

Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica brings us news of a disgruntled Washington D.C. Comcast customer who has filed a lawsuit against Comcast over claims of false advertising. The complaint seeks punitive damages, class-action status, and attorneys' fees. The customer claims Comcast advertised 'unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer.' We discussed a similar lawsuit brought against Comcast by a Californian customer back in November, as well as the FCC investigation into Comcast's practices. While Comcast confirmed reception of the new lawsuit, they declined to comment on it directly. Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'"

But...

Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'

But that's not what they're being accused of.
Their spokesman gets an A for confusing the issue.

Re:But...

Which is great, at least for Comcast.

Their greatest strategy is to keep confusing the issue and trying to keep from clarifying differences because otherwise they have no case. Remember that there are still people who think that the internet is "a series of tubes" or the like, and it doesn't take much to get a judge to rule in their favor simply because he fails to understand the difference between "blocking" and "throttling", at least in internet terms.

Re:

it doesn't take much to get a judge to rule in their favor simply because he fails to understand the difference between "blocking" and "throttling"

See people, this is why we need car analogies !

Enough with the damn tubes!

It IS a series of tubes. If you're trying to explain how the network of interconnected nodes that we call the internet works - a series of tubes is a great straight-forward analogy that damn near everyone can understand. It's an analogy I used to use to e

Alternate reality.

Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.

Of course [msn.com] they don't block [arstechnica.com] anyone's traffic [digitaltrends.com]. Why would anyone dare claim they would stoop to such low measures? Why, they're Comcastic [freepress.net]!

Re:

here is [dslreports.com] the best report of how they do it in details that are more satisfactory to me. tag: Sandvine.

Haha, good luck.

You're arguing with Comcast about the words they used to describe their service? Do you know how that works in the UK?

Unlimited 1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.

4. (ISP Def. only) Confined within limits; restricted or circumscribed: a limited space; limited resources.)

Re:

Nowhere on Comcast's site, does it say "Unlimited". That was taken off years ago.

Re:

You're arguing with Comcast about the words they used to describe their service?

Actually, when they were trying to sell their service to me, I believe they used the word, "Comcastic".

Comcast blocks a great deal of online applications

Servers. Last I checked.. hosting your own email, telnet, httpd servers (I'm sure there are others - seems like it's most of the well known ports (1023)) wasn't doable using standard ports - both against TOS and directly dropped into /dev/null. If a judg

Re:Comcast blocks a great deal of online applicati

up to 1023.. forgot to do < manually

Re:Comcast blocks a great deal of online applicati

This is regional, unfortunately. I mean, it's good that it works in some places, and if you actually ask a tech, they'll say "we don't allow it," but I run an FTP server at home and it works just fine. I also had a web server up for a short while, but th

Class action

Is this going to get federal class action status if out of staters join in with the defendent? If not, count me in to make it federal.

Personal Experience

I have Cablevision, and I have noticed that I was throttled after downloading torrent files. The interesting thing was that they throttled my upload speed only, which I didn't even notice until I tried to upload a file to a friend of mine and it was capped

Yeah right

Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'"

So please explain to me why Linux distros were PAINFULLY slow to download until I implemented rules on my firewall to block RST packets?

Tagging this article "getfios"

Re:Better idea

There are plenty of legitmate uses for bit torrent. Blizzard uses it to distribute patches, and vuze uses it to distribute liscensed content.

Re:Better idea

And that constitutes how many percent points of total torrent traffic?

Re:Better idea

I can't tell if this is flamebait or not, so I'll be good and reply instead of modding.

As long as it's over 0%, the percentage doesn't matter. The point is, they're supposed to be a common carrier and route the damn packets. Customers and services that customers pay to use rely on ISPs adhering to standards. And please, don't make Comcast out to be some great defender of the Copyright. They're only doing this to save their stockholders money- nothing more.

Besides, piracy existed (and still does) well before the Torrent protocol. HTTP, IRC, SMTP, and FTP are all still used to transfer files in violation of copyright. Should Comcast throttle these indiscriminately as well? Where do you draw the line?

Re:

Everyone uses this argument as reasoning for why Comcast *SHOULDN'T* throttle bit torrent traffic, but the large majority of bit torrent traffic is illegitimate to begin with. As someone said before, how much of a percentage of bit torrent traffic is legal

Re:

CD/DVD-Burners should be banned because people can copy movies/music.

SSSH! Are you NUTS? Don't talk so loud, you'll give THEM IDEAS.

Re:

Don't forget to add, "Reproduction should be banned because it can create killers"

Re:No, they don't block them

Exactly.

This is why any net neutrality proposal that allows traffic shaping is utterly worthless. Because an ISP can then take any protocol they like and throttle it back to one byte every ten centuries, and then say "...but we're allowed to do traffic shaping, your honour"

Re: "Block as a verb"

Isn't the answer to define block on a data particle level?

"Did X action related to this policy block one or more bits of data? Yes or No."

Take it out of the adjective "State of zero data throughput".

Re:They just don't get it

They probably did a cost analysis and determined that it was cheaper to deal with the lawsuits than to upgrade their infrastructure. There is little risk of losing their customers, because in most markets they have no competition.

You can buy your natural gas from one provider and have it delivered by the one with the local monopoly on the pipes. Why can't we do this with internet connections?

Re:

Yeah, but one does have to wonder, how many lawsuits were they thinking of dealing with? And even though they have a virtual monopoly currently in certain markets, said monopoly is not necessarily permanent, and whatever local groups they have franchise ag