Comcast's Internet 'Throttling' Exposes Tip of the Iceberg

That cable giant Comcast is throttling the free flowing Internet is no surprise to many industry watchers who have warned repeatedly that network owners are building content discrimination into their business models.

Sooner or later one of them was going to get caught. Indeed, Associated Press' recent Comcast exposé reveals just the tip of the iceberg. Comcast isn't the only company seeking to cripple your ability to share information with others. Other service providers are deploying related technology in their own bid to become the gatekeepers to what we do online.

On Thursday, Om Malik looked up the technology Comcast uses to spy upon and block peer-to-peer sharing and found evidence that other ISPs and carriers "are engaging in traffic shaping and management."

Malik points to Sandvine -- an Ontario-based company that provides this technology -- which counts "eight of the top 20 broadband service providers in the U.S." as customers. While Comcast has been snared in one investigation, several other network providers are lurking online with technology that can similarly block us at their whim.

Ghosts in the Machine

And it's not just Sandvine. Earlier this year, AT&T joined forces with Hollywood in a plan to sift Internet traffic for alleged violations of copyright. To do this AT&T would likely use technology offered by Sandvine competitor Cisco, which sells its very own "deep packet inspection" services to any ISP that cay pay the price.

The Cisco technology -- uncovered in plain view by Internet freedom fighter Jeff Chester -- allows client companies like AT&T and Verizon to seize greater control over our Web surfing. In a series of white papers, Cisco urges its network clientele to "meter individual subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are "tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is doing" and "where the subscriber resides."

AT&T also has patented its own content "shaping" technology designed to implement a "hierarchical arbitration scheme" over the flow of online information. It's a safe bet that they would like to use this to privilege their own sites and services over the blogs, content sharing and Web sites of average Internet users. But AT&T went one further, developing a programming language that allows it to mine data from customer telephone and internet communications for surveillance purposes.

This sort of discriminatory content "management" is a gross violation of Net Neutrality -- the longstanding principle that had once guaranteed a free and open Internet.

Net Neutrality was struck from the books by the FCC in a now infamous 2005 ruling. We're now getting a clear glimpse of the aftermath of this decision -- a world in which companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are allowed to dictate where we go, what we watch and with whom we share information via the Web. And it's a chilling sight.

The YouTube 'Threat'

The not-so-hidden secret behind all of this is video. Network owners are waging a quiet campaign to control how video gets distributed via the Web. In their view, the Internet should only be used for email and surfing. Internet video should be distributed via ISPs. It's a model that treats the Internet like cable TV -- where companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon get to pick the channels you get to see.

The popular trend in video, however, is streaming in the opposite direction. More and more people are becoming their own creators and distributors of homespun video content. For proof that people like to watch videos created by others, go no further than YouTube, which boasts more than 100 million downloads each day.

YouTube is just the beginning of this revolution. Peer-to-peer traffic is spreading via popular technologies like Bit Torrent and Gnutella, which allow users to upload and share videos, music and other rich media without a middleman. The phone and cable companies are desperate to shut down this Web innovation. They're doing it by spying on traffic and stifling the free exchange of ideas that will continue to make the Internet so remarkable.

Comcast's 'Busy Signal'

Comcast's own executives have said that the company "occasionally" delays peer-to-peer traffic using a frighteningly honest analogy about getting a busy signal when making a phone call. "[Your call] will get there eventually," he says, while denying that preventing connections is the same as blocking "calls."

Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica found that Comcast's own FAQ claims that the company engages in "no discrimination based on the type of content" offering customers "unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications" on the Internet.

"You have absolutely nothing to fear from us," phone and cable company PR executives can be heard saying every time their content meddling makes headlines. But at the same time they're spending hundreds of millions on lobbyists to destroy any legislation that would prevent them from realizing our greatest fears -- an Internet where they hold the keys.

Stopping Discrimination Before It's the Norm

On Thursday, Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) joined from across the aisle to call for hearings into content discrimination.

They wrote that recent incidents have raised "serious concern about the phone and cable companies' power to discriminate," and called upon the Senate Commerce Committee "to determine if they were based on legitimate business and network management policies or part of practices that would be deemed unfair and anti-competitive."

No matter how you slice it, this new trend of ISP discrimination should send a chill draft up the spine of anyone who wants the Internet to fulfill its democratic promise of equal opportunity communication.

To do this we have to ensure that companies aren't left to stifle our basic freedoms at their whim. Free and open communications must be guaranteed, right now, before content blocking technology becomes the Internet norm.

Comments

[Nemesis02]

I'd have to agree with the article, what they are doing is a violation of the Net Neutrality Act. When people think of Bit Torrent, the first thing that pops into their minds is illegal, pirated video and software however, there are many legal purposes for Bit Torrent. Bit Torrent is used in games such as World of Warcraft to distribute their updates, and websites that distribute linux distros also use it for getting their new updated operating system out faster to their users which are legal uses.

When push comes to shove, if we let the ISP providers continue on this path, what is to stop them from taking it a step further and lets say monitor your email communication or instant messaging communication? The internet is a public domain and what their are delving into I do consider to be censorship of the net, even if they only delay bit torrent traffic, and do it to point where that connection times out.

To circumvent this form of traffic shaping though, like the post reads, it looks at the packets and decides whether that packet is a p2p packet or not. Bit Torrent packets can be encrypted, torrent clients such as uTorrent and Azureus offer data packet encryption.

The way Sandvine works, which is what comcast uses, if it detects a user using some form of bit torrent, it sends a false packet masking itself as the server that person is talking too telling the user to kill its connection. Since a packet is being sent by that system, why not stop it at the door? Users with a linux based firewall can block that packet from being received by their torrent client by the following line in the firewall settings.

iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED -p tcp "dport $TORRENT_CLIENT_PORT "tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

I just find it amazing how companies will spend millions on a system, yet the way to circumvent that system only takes a little bit of research and is something we already have available to all.

[Sundialsvc4]

I join in the opinion that there are at least four separate issues here: copyright, cost, necessary load-balancing, and (maybe) censorship. I do not immediately jump to the conclusion that "it must be censorship and it must be bad, therefore we must outlaw it." If the premises do not singularly and necessarily support the conclusion, the wrong conclusion might become law -- with quite devastating technical consequences that would be extremely hard to un-do.

[Guitarsandmore]

I"m looking at the Cisco web site and reading about traffic shaping.

If traffic shaping is not used then excess traffic is dropped or remarked and there can be no guaranteed rate. With traffic shaping the excess packets are retained in a queue and then scheduled for later transmission over time. The result is a smoothed packet output rate and rates given to Voip and IP traffic can be guaranteed.

There is nothing here about looking at content or filtering out content. This is merely a way to provide a guaranteed rate. It"s actually very smart.

[Timothy Karr - Huffpost Blogger]

See Timothy Karr's Profile

You need to look at their "deep packet inspection" technology. It explicitly allows network owners to sift through the content of Web communications and filter out or degrade types of traffic that they deem inappropriate.

The links above should get you there. If you can't find it, I suggest sending a note to Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy -- he has captured the Cisco "whitepapers" that discuss this function.

[Guitarsandmore]

Using the search engine on the Cisco web site I have found the document "Using the Service Control Engine and Deep Packet Inspection in the Data Center (Application Optimization)".

Wow! What a great tool this is! If I were a network manager I would want something just exactly like this! On the other hand it is definitely "Big Brother" if you want to use it that way.

It does say it is for Traffic Management and that you can use it to control end-user applications such as peer to peer applications.

Some other applications include security, resource, and admission control.

Another possible use is Policy enforcements and service enhancements such as personalization of content or content filtering. There you go.

¦¦..determines the contents of a particular packet, and then either records that information for statistical purposes or performs an action on the packet.

So different types of packets could be treated different ways, that only makes sense. Voice traffic could be pushed into the fast lane and emails and such into the slow lane.

Look at those reports! I like the top subscribers report and all of the other reports. This makes me want to be a network manager!

Clearly this is a powerful tool that would require a great deal of integrity on the part of the network administrators and all who would have access to this information. Unfortunately with our government and its out of control army of torture-I mean "enhanced interrogation experts"- there seems to be an integrity shortage right now.

I can see why a network manager would want to have this very valuable network management tool and I can also see why it scares everybody half to death!

I am wondering if looking into each packet would introduce some latency all by itself.

[fn0rd]

There were a lot of concerns around in 2000 or so when ISP's started implmenting "shallow" packet inspection - and, having written some of the applications to use it myself, it was far less sinister than expected: Mostly, it is a way to figure out cost-effective design on a network.

An example might be, that I see clusters of traffic from customers in one area, to web sites hosted by a particular company, and use that information to negotiate a low-cost peering agreement with them.

A customer sitting in front of a computer watching a web page slowly load, or trying to dec ph r a laggy pho e call ac oss the Int rnet is going to be annoyed immediately, and will cost you money. Don't care who they're talking to. Some guy who left Azureus running while he's sleeping is going to whine a lot, but won't cancel.

You can't play both the "provider interested only in money", and the "provider wants to censor ideas" hands. The two are mutually exclusive. While porn still generates more traffic than conspiracy websites, a paying customer is a paying customer.

(and you don't need deep packet inspection to find p2p - you simply look for unusually high traffic combined with unusually high "pairings" of hosts.)

[SouthJerseySteve]

If you pay for a service, you agree to follow their rules. If you don't like their rules, take your money and go elsewhere. Any questions?

[Timothy Karr - Huffpost Blogger]

See Timothy Karr's Profile

Here's one: Where else can users go?

The average number of broadband network providers available to an American is two. For tens of millions there is only one choice of broadband services in their communities.

The broadband marketplace in America is controlled by a handful of cable and phone companies (more than 98 percent of residential broadband connections are controlled by this duopoly). And many of these companies are the same ones that have announced their intention to "manage" traffic in a way that let's them pick and choose what works for you and what doesn't.

So, if one or both of your providers is discriminating in a way that you don't like, what other choices do you have?

[Guitarsandmore]

There is another way to look at this. If I am a user that likes to burst up to 100 Mbps but only once in awhile and my neighbor is running 100 mbps full bore 24 X 7 then why should I have to pay the same rate as my neighbor? This could work out to your advantage.

Comcast offers you .0005 cents per million packets and Verizon comes along and offers you .0004 cents per million packets. Look at what happened in the long distance wars.

Competition can drive the price down but you have to be a shrewd bargain hunter spelled vendor basher.

[JWakkaJane]

"This sort of discriminatory content "management" is a gross violation of Net Neutrality -- the longstanding principle that had once guaranteed a free and open Internet."

(That net neutrality link didn't go through for me.)

Didn't reaffirmation of net neutrality just kinda get left on the backburner, leaving a convenient pregnant pause, rapidly filling with this opportunistic crap as if that legitimized such practices as fortunes in telecom spare change are thrown at lobbying etcetera in attempts to force formal legalization of some sort of '2-lane' 'tollbooth' death-of-internet as we know it deal? It's like they're thinking they're gonna bully it through one way or the other.

[fn0rd]

There are three distinct issues here, which probably should not be confused:

1. Copyright protection - sticky issue, obviously. The near-eternal protections afforded Mickey Mouse are revolting, and yes, the idiots in hollywood who have turned HDTV into a battlefield littered with the corpses of anyone who has ever purchased HD equipment.

2. Economics - yes, bandwidth costs money. People who buy a 10mb/s circuit and expect to be able to use 100% of it pay a lot more than people who buy a cable modem. $50-100 per Mb/s is not far off. Consumer broadband is affordable because it's based on interactive use. One BT session generates equivalent traffic to several hundred users, even including VoIP, Itunes, and YouTube (which is surprisingly gentle on networks).

Throttling "bulk" traffic at peak hours to allow real-time protocols like VoIP, QT streaming, or simply HTTP to be responsive, just seems like a better alternative than charging commercial rates.

3. Censorship. Doesn't work well on the internet. The best way to get a piece of knowledge widely disseminated is to try to stamp it out. Ask the DVD CCA how well *that* worked for them.

I mean, c'mon. We all want to watch that Simpsons eipsode we missed, and we don't want to pay for it, but to call this censorship is a little weak.

[Guitarsandmore]

At last, someone who knows what the hell they are talking about.

[blooddoc]

Any censorship of internet traffic threatens to destroy the only real interactive medium for the exchange of information and ideas that we have today. Print media, radio, and certainly TV have become one-way streets where the owners of media decide what we see and hear. On the internet, anyone can express an opinion or share an idea, a true democracy albeit caveat emptor. The power brokers and money grubbers rightly fear this because it threatens their existence. This is a battle the average American - indeed, the average world citizen - cannot afford to lose. Preserve net neutrality - even nationalize the net, if necessary.

[PigLipstick]

I have been a long time DSL customer of SBC which morphed into AT&T last year. Amazing how streaming content that would flow with little interruption is now riddled with long pauses and time outs that terminate the connection. This all started this year shortly after the AT&T name replaced that of SBC. I've obviously been shifted to a lower grade of service but, strangely enough, my monthly bill still reflects my same billing rate ?

DSL or Cable access to the Internet, It doesn't matter as these are both just pipes to carry the data to and from the network. When the same company owns both the cable company and the telephone network and is allowed to buy government influence and manipulate the network's operation to fit their private plans, we all lose another freedom !

[MunkEBidnis]

Yeah, my Daily Briefs stopped about 2-1/2 weeks ago. Comc*st. Hmmmm.

[tao53nyc]

Earthlink has been screwing with LewRockwell.com for ages. I used to get a regular daily e-mail from LRC at my E-link account for years. A few months ago, it just stopped coming. No reason. LRC insists there's nothing going on at their end. E-link makes lame excuses, makes requests for obscure settings info (which haven't changed in years), then simply ignore further requests for explanation. I've tried whitelisting, everything. It just stopped. The only remaining reason could be a deliberate filter of some kind, with the excuse of "stopping spam".

Fortunately there's RSS.

[Issak]

tac53nyc

Pardon my ignorance, what's RSS?

[getoffmedz]

Dear Mr. Karr:

Verizon is "throttling" Huffington Post.

Started about three weeks ago.

ISPs can "censor" whoever they want especially after they turn YOUR traffic over to the fucking Bush/Cheney swine herd.

Check it out.

[patriotscholar]

Ok, how do you know that? More details, please...

[Issak]

patriotscholar,

He doesn't, getoffmeds is a notorius crank-who seldom makes any sense...unforrtunate because it just muddles
the waters- and stunts legitimate arguments.