Congressman Tells Comcast, Hands Off BitTorrent

An anonymous reader writes "Just a few months back, the Net Neutrality debate was all but dead. Luckily for fans of a free Internet, the telcos are their own worst enemies. Recent stories involving Verizon Wireless blocking pro-choice groups, AT&T censoring Pearl Jam's anti-war comments from a streaming concert, and most recently, Comcast finally admitting to using anti-BitTorrent filters. The Net Neutrality debate would appear to be alive and kicking, with Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) being the first politician to make a public statement sharply criticizing Comcast's actions."

Re:Nice glasses

[brandor]

Congressman Boucher rocks. He actually does a great job of getting things done for everyone. It doesn't hurt that he is all about technology either. He's probably the main force driving broadband adoption in Southwest Virginia (my home). Some the most recent things he's helped get accomplished are a major fiber optic pipe to Lebanon, VA (it's slowly making it's way to my small town), that pipe has convinced at least two global companies to set up shop in Southwest VA. Northrop Grumman being one and CGI-AMS being the other. He does such a great job and is liked so much that I don't think he has even had anyone oppose him in the election for the past several years. And if someone has opposed him, he won by such a margin that they might as well have not shown up. (This is me talking, I'm too lazy to look up any stats, so what I just said could be completely wrong. But, he rocks so much, it doesn't matter. Watch out Chuck Norris?)

Re:Sigh

[mikael_j]

Completely blocking an entire protocol isn't QoS, Qos is about giving priority to certain types of traffic that need lower latency or more bandwidth, an example would be VoIP which needs low latency to not become useless.

What Comcast has been doing is outright blocking an entire protocol, sort of like how some ISPs block their users' ability to use SMTP, mostly outbound but in some cases inbound as well. The difference being that there is a good reason to block outbound SMTP, it may be a PITA for those trying to run their own mail server but at least the reason isn't so much direct greed as it is to protect the network at large from zombie machines trying to spam the rest of the net...

/Mikael

Re:Nice glasses

[je ne sais quoi]

Boucher was also one of the most vocal opponents of Clinton's impeachment, and has also been on record criticizing the excesses DMCA as well. He's one of the few congressmen that I'm actually glad is in in office.

Re:Sigh

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Comcast's treatment of goes even farther though, they simply terminate the stream. It's one thing to have it slow down or lower priority than other services, but halting or ending transfers is a different matter.

Re:Great start

[compro01]

you can get debtorrent [debian.org] for that i believe.

Re:Simple soulation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Insightful"? How is the parent "Insightful"? He thinks cable companies are common carriers, which they are not. He's not "Insightful", he's "Ignorent".

Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu

[wperry1]

I believe the term he meant to use was oligarchy which somehow gets confused with fascism over and over.

oligarchy: a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also : a group exercising such control

from: http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=oligarchy [merriam-webster.com]

What is being missed in all this

[Kylere]

if you use Comcast DNS servers, you are also randomly being blocked from visiting www.google.com and the block is due to a reset command being sent from Comcast. Using a DNS server not managed by monkeys like opendns.com allows you back on Google. This has been occuring to people since Comcast started playing with BT traffic. Try a search of http://www.google.com/search?q=connection+reset+google+comcast&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a/ [google.com] to see some people talking about it. Since they have the capability to block sites this way also, why is the RIAA not suing them for failing to block Pirate Bay?

Re:Comcast Tesll Congressman: We Own Your Colleagu

[camperslo]

Comcast has politely reminded this wayward congressman that in America laws are paid for by bribes. Comcast then offered the congressman a "campaign contribution", silencing his dissent. The system works.

That is why F.C.C. rules should be changed to ban paid-for political ads on radio, tv, satellite and cable.
They should bring back the old rules where broadcasters commit on their license/renewal applications to a minimum amount of public affairs programming (which could included free political time) and limits on the maximum number of commercial minutesper hour. Broadcasters could pick their own numbers, but could be at a disadvantage at renewal time if a competing applicant wants to do more to serve the community.
What I suggest is not a restriction on free speech, only a restriction on what broadcasters can accept payment for.

Most of the corruption we see with our politicians relates to them selling out to obtain money for campaigns. Eliminating money from the picture for radio and tv would certainly lessen the need to raise money for campaigns.

We should go back to earlier much more restrictive rules on how many stations a licensee could own. I think we should go beyond that and require that some specified percentage (perhaps increasing over time) of stations in a region have licensees that live in the city-grade coverage area of their station. Having local licensees would go a long ways towards making broadcasters more responsive to serving the needs of their local communities.

Having a free and diverse press and broadcasters and a free flow of information is essential for democracy to function properly. We should not allow any corporate or special interest groups to own a sizeable chunk of our broadcast stations. These stations are supposed to be trustees of the public interest, not just cash cows for large companies.

Re:Comcast seems to be fast

[Anonymous Coward]

So all of those 'connection reset by peer' messages in the log are just my imagination?
Or maybe that I've downloaded 2.0GB and only managed to upload 6MB?

Re:Sigh

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

Because blocking / restricting SMTP and throttling / blocking virus infected clients is actually a good thing and a service to the internet community.

The Storm worm uses P2P (edonkey IIRC) for command and control. Using your logic, if you're willing to block/restrict/throttle SMTP because of spam and virus infested clients, should they not also block/restrict/throttle P2P to prevent the same thing?

Filtering (or throttling into uselessness) a protocol to lower the overall bandwidth consumption is only done because the ISP in question oversold their pipes too much and is not investing enough money into upgrading and maintaining their networks.

DOCSIS is a shared service. You can only saturate so much bandwidth onto a line at once. Your 10 Mbit (or whatever) connection is for peak service, not constant throughput. DOCSIS 2.0 supports 38 Mbit per second per channel on the download side (27 up). If you want your full 10 Mbit all the time, you can have, at most, 4 users per channel (and an T3 for every 4 users). There are a total of 52 channels, so you can support 208 users with no digital tv available or you can buy lots of head end equipment to keep that many users on a handful of channels. Ok... so 4 users probably won't be using the service all the time. Lots of people just want a burst rate to get a web page or maybe a PDF. So, what's the right number of users per channel? Is 20 people per channel good? They can each get about 2Mbit per second if they're all using it at the same time. Of course, if the pipe is saturated in either direction, latency is going to suck for applications like VOIP. So, obviously you're going to want to prioritize certain traffic. Similarly, you're going to want what people use interactively to have good throughput (ie, websites). At the bottom of the list is the traffic that isn't latency dependent, has nobody sitting there waiting to use it and that consumes the most bandwidth in relation to every other user on the network. You might be able to put 100 people who generally just browse the web and read email on one channel. Put 8 P2P users on their own channel and they'll all complain. 2 or 3 frequent P2P users might wreck the experience of the other 50 people on the same channel. So, where is the happy medium? Isn't that the question. Exactly where is "oversold their pipes?"

You can always price out a T2 instead of complaining about your cable service so you don't have an oversold pipe. Of course, you don't want to pay full price for the level of service that you want, you expect all those web surfing dolts to subsidize you.

Lest you think I'm just some cable apologizer, I don't like the advertising either. When I first got my cable modem, the advertising was "up to 10 Mbit/s" while the modems were capped at 2Mbit/s. It took 6 or 7 years to finally get the level of service I was sold. I just think you're being hypocritical for bitching they should block one service while leaving your pet service unthrottled and then complaining you aren't getting your money's worth when your monthly payment only covers a fraction of the cost of the full bandwidth you want.

habeas corpus

[falconwolf]

There are currently limitations on habeas corpus for aliens, not citizens.

The GP is right and you're wrong on this. All the Bush admin feels it needs to do is call someone an enemy combatant [consortiumnews.com]. This admin denied the US citizen Jose Padilla habeas corpus. CATO has called this a Dangerous Precedent [cato.org].

Falcon