Following an experiment launched by tech wiz and nerd extraordinaire Peter Eckersly, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and David Downs of SF Week; Eckersly concluded that Comcast was intercepting transmissions between the users of p2p file sharing program BitTorrent and stopping them from being sent.
The pair monitored the transmission of a PDF file sent from Downs’s home in San Fransisco (where he is a Comcast subscriber) to a computer in Melbourne via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer content delivery utility. Using a program called Wireshark, Eckersly was able to deduce that communication between the San Francisco and Melbourn computers stoped upon being instructed by a third party to do so.
Unbenounced to thoes outside the technoverse is an age old hacker technique called spoofing, which according to Downs and Eckersly, is being employed by Comcast to “manage” bandwidth hogging uploaders.
Organizations like Free Press and Public Knowledge, that are aimed at protecting the neutrality of the internet, are concerned about the implications of Comcasts’ actions. The company’s alleged infringement on the unwritten laws of the internet provoke questions about the sanctity of the Net. Does Comcast have the right to deny users of it’s service based on what applications they choose to run? The techies are screaming data discrimination, but are simultaneously wary of getting the FCC involved.
The controversy represents a significant threat to all parties involved. As the second largest proprietors of the internet in the US, Comcast acts as the gatekeeper to the unfettered potential of the internet. If gone unchecked Comcast could continue edging users off of programs that are increasingly relevant to business owners and file sharers alike. In a FCC complaint filed against Comcast, non-profit’s Free Press and Public Knowledge state, “This burden constitutes irreparable harm. Internet discrimination likely costs society billions in lost innovation in applications [and] lost consumer value in garnering products and content of their choice.”
SF Weekly Article: www.sfweekly.com
Free Press: www.freepress.net
Public Knowledge: www.publicknowledge.org
photo: Aaron Piland for SF Weekly.