Tell Your Rep That You are a Net Neutrality Voter

Last week there was news that Comcast was blocking traffic from BitTorrent, Gnutella, and other file sharing operations, Comcast has finally responded to these reports. They say that they are not blocking these applications, they are just delaying them.

Speaking on background in a phone interview earlier today, a Comcast Internet executive admitted that reality was a little more complex. The company uses data management technologies to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays. As part of that management process, he said, the company occasionally – but not always – delays some peer-to-peer file transfers that eat into Internet speeds for other users on the network.

Of course, some of these applications have legal uses, BitTorrent was developed to do online software releases, and almost every Linux distro these days uses it, and it is blocking crippling other applications, like Lotus Notes.

While I think that Notes is one of the worst email/groupware packages ever written, and I would not shed a tear to see it gone, it would be inappropriate for me, as an ISP, to block it.

So, not only is Comcast dishonest and hypocritical, they are also incompetent. Who would have expected that from the cable company.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the same sort of packet forging that the AP did (and that Broadband Reports readers did some time ago), and continued its testing to see if other applications are affected. The answer is a disturbing "yes." The results of additional testing done by the EFF indicate Comcast is sending forged reset packets with some Gnutella traffic. When the EFF ran a Gnutella node on a Comcast connection, the forged reset packets disrupted communication between the nodes.

What's particularly insidious about Comcast's packet forging is that it's transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they'll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.

Even if you accept the argument that all P2P traffic is inherently evil, and that Comcast has the right to disrupt it in order to put a stop to copyright infringement, Comcast's traffic-shaping efforts have apparently extended beyond the realm of P2P and into good old enterprise groupware. Kevin Kanarski, who works as a Lotus Notes messaging engineer, noticed some strange behavior with Lotus Notes when hooked up to a Comcast connection last month.

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast's network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they're greeted with the error message, "Remote system no longer responding." Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast's reset packets are the culprit. Instead of passing the legitimate e-mail through its network, Comcast's traffic monitoring tool (likely Sandvine) is sitting in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server.

So there is more than some arcane issue of people wanting their free music and pr0n, through incompetence (remember, this is the cable company), they are blocking legitimate software too,