Comcast : a new twist on internet traffic policing
For everyone following the debate on Internet data discrimination and Net Neutrality, this has been an interesting week.
On Friday, AP news reported that Comcast was actively interfering with file-sharing among some customers of it’s high-speed internet service. AP news reported that :
“The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.”
The service discrimination was noticed by users of file-sharing systems like BitTorrent and Gnutella, which generate disproportionately large amounts of internet traffic.
To test these claims by Comcast users, AP reporters did some testing of their own, using a King James Bible (picked because it is not copyright protected and has a convenient file size). Using BitTorrent, an AP reporter in New York attempted to download the Bible from two computers, in San Francisco and Philadelphia respectively, which were connected to the Internet through Comcast. In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When the reporters tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.
The blocking mechanism used by Comcast was described thus :
“when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user, each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer - it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”“
This incident brings up an interesting angle to the net neutrality debate. Last year, as part if it’s acquisition of BellSouth, FCC stipulated that AT&T could not prioritize Internet traffic based on origin. However, there were no conditions about prioritizing traffic based on it’s type, which is what Comcast is doing.
The practice of managing the flow of Internet data is known as “traffic shaping”, and is already widespread among Internet service providers. Typically, applications needing more bandwidth are slowed down, giving priority to other traffic.
While Comcast customers, as well as the affected software vendors acknowledge that company has the right to manage it’s network, Comcast’s tactic of interfering with network traffic by making their computers impersonate those of their users’ is seen as deceptive. That is to say, Comcast does not merely kill the file upload by blocking the transmission of packets, it sends a reset (RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be the host computer at the other end of the BitTorrent transmission. This is, interestingly, the same “censorship” technique used by the government of China to terminate connections that matched filtered keywords.
So what’s the difference between closing the connection outright as opposed to using falsified resets? In my opinion, it is fraud. Simply closing the connection would be a truthful statement on Comcast’s ability to manage high-density peer-to-peer applications; a customer could use this information to decide wether Comcast’s service fulfills their needs. By sending the reset packets, Comcast is essentially lying to it’s customers who are affected.
In the end, I believe, this has less to do with Net neutrality, and much more to do with one company’s deceptive practices.