A “Sandvine” for internet customers
Two months ago, Comcast was in the news for it’s covert attempts at traffic-shaping, by throttling peer-to-peer file sharing between BitTorrent customers. The cable internet provider reportedly used equipment from Sandvine, a Canadian company which makes networking equipment designed for traffic policing, i.e. blocking new and forcefully terminating already established internet connections when required.
In a counter move, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released software that helps users determine whether online hiccups they are experiencing are genuine network delays or evidence of deliberate network traffic manipulation.
The EFF said that the software, which looks for discrepancies between data that was sent by a host or routing computer, and what was actually received by the ‘user’ computer, will help users identify cases of network interference in the data transfer. This gives internet customers their own little “Sandvines” to keep tabs on the network!
Commenting on this, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann said that “Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers. When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves.”
While I completely agree that Comcast has been misleading in it’s practices, and evasive in it’s handling of the matter, the “data discrimination” comment gets into a thornier issue. As I mentioned in an earlier post, data discrimination is the unwelcome byproduct of traffic shaping (which, legally, a company is allowed to do). Applications requiring higher network capacity tend to be the first to be terminated, because they strain the network disproportionately.
Activists in the net neutrality debate already seem confused between data discrimination for traffic-shaping vs. content discrimination, i.e. refusal to carry traffic from content or applications providers; the EFF using the words in this context helps to further muddle the issues.
That said, Verizon recently announced that it would “provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008.”
This is definitely a shift in direction for Verizon…. Makes one wonder about something Ed Felton said about maintaining the threat of regulation, while leaving the issue unresolved – a position which puts the big internet service providers on their guard. And that is perhaps a sufficient condition to maintain net neutrality in the long run.