There has been a standoff between the major ISPs and content business these past few years, as the US Federal Communications Commission has issued only scant guidance over the issue of blocking certain types of traffic, but all that is now set to come to a head once more, with Comcast likely to be the first to test the FCC’s nerve.
VoIP traffic has been blocked in the past by ISPs, until a ruling in 2005 said that this was not legal, after local telco Madison River tried to block traffic. Previously the FCC had said that VoIP was an interstate service so could not be taxed by every state that it went through. Embodied in these decisions was the idea that IP services should not be blocked (or taxed), but at the time the FCC said that it did not feel that a new law was required.
But Comcast is now under fire, in a class action brought by a Californian individual (John Hart) alleging that it is throttling back on P2P traffic, and that this violates federal computer fraud laws and honesty in advertising laws, as well as the contracts that it has with its own users.
The fact that ‘traffic shaping’ has become widely used in both Telcos and Cable operators to prioritize traffic across their Broadband Remote Access Servers is well understood. Initially this has just targeted the huge bandwidth required by illegal P2P activity, with the idea that no-one can sue the ISP in order to promote piracy. But in some cases it appears that the P2P activity is legal and that other applications, such as IBM’s Lotus Notes, exhibit the same kind of traffic behavior as P2P and gets blocked mistakenly.
Users of BitTorrent in particular are upset, because although there is a lot of illegal activity across BitTorrent still, the company spawned from BitTorrent relies entirely on new legal services.
The crux of the matter is that Comcast advertises its broadband service with no data limits, and yet it is slowing down high volume traffic.
Wired magazine put the question to Comcast this week and was told categorically that Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent and does not interfere with how fast internet connections operate. This appears to be very carefully worded, because no-one is actually saying that Comcast is blocking traffic, it is prioritizing it, which just happens to have the result of making it go slow.
There are other allegations, for instance published in The Register this week, that Cox is another cable company that is also doing much the same as Comcast, blocking eDonkey and Gnutella to the extent where it is terminating connections ‘ again unproven and not admitted to.
On the heels of Hart’s suit, a Palo Alto business called Vuze, which uses BitTorrent to distribute video content, has filed a petition with the FCC asking for rules to be brought in to prevent ISPs blocking, degrading or discriminating against legal Internet applications.
Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a Washington based public interest group supporting rights in the digital culture, has issued a statement backing the Vuze complaint, which said, ‘The Commission’s broadband policy is shaped largely by its Policy Statement, which announced that consumers are entitled to access the lawful content of their choice, to run applications and use services of their choice, and to benefit from competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers. Each of these principles is subject to ‘reasonable network management.’
‘These policy principles emphasize the importance of an open Internet as a vehicle for empowering consumers, and appropriately put consumers at the forefront of the discussion about whether broadband network operators are inappropriately leveraging their control over their networks by blocking, degrading or unreasonably discriminating against lawful Internet traffic.’
He went on to say that Vuze has so far been able to develop workarounds, but that this has wasted precious resources
Comcast may just be innocently thinking that it is giving low priority to high volume video traffic, which is most likely piracy, but it might also be cutting out traffic deliberately which competes with its own TV services.
As such Vuze and Public Knowledge are calling on the FCC to make a clear ruling on network management and what operators are allowed to do and wants them forced to reveal their ‘traffic shaping’ strategies so that legal IP service suppliers can have some certainty about how best to deliver online video.
The failed attempts to place Network Neutrality into a US law, meant that it was only a matter of time before operators like Comcast were going to begin blocking traffic and the natural way is to target those applications eating all of the bandwidth for a few greedy users. But if the content businesses of this world want to create internet video business models on the same scale as existing broadcasters, then a compromise between those that provide content and those which provide bandwidth needs to be reached and the best placed organization to take that task on is the FCC, taking a lead for the rest of the world.
Outside of the US traffic shaping is rampant and most online video services find themselves falling foul of ‘throttling back’ or excessive peering charges, or both. The FCC needs to take this on, examine it carefully, and having obtained a US compromise, feed the idea into the international internet community, because this problem is not going to go away.