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."

Vuze Inc. = Azureus

[hansamurai]

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.

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

[faloi]

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.

Re:What about other blocked traffic?

[phoenixwade]

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.

Re:1.77 Trillion Dollars?

[kaizokuace]

With the dollar droppin' it like it's hot I don't think so.

Cox doing the same.

[californication]

Cox is doing the same thing, sending out reset messages to kill the connection for seeders. According to DSL Reports, they starting doing this sometime in Mid-November. I haven't tried to use P2P in a while, but I just tried to download something over P2P yesterday and couldn't break 60kB/s on a well seeded torrent. I have been able to get up to 500kB/s in the past. I'm down in San Diego.