Comcast to face lawsuits over BitTorrent filtering

Found on CNet News on Monday, 22 October 2007
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It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes are also suffering.

I was also able to interview a Comcast Internet executive who would only speak on background. He bobbed and weaved, sticking to his talking points, yet a few things were clear: he would not deny that the company was sending out TCP RST packets, but stated that if it were being done, it was at a "low level" where average users would not see it.

A Comcast engineer who spoke to the Tech Liberation Front's Tim Lee confirmed this, stating that "most users wouldn't even be able to detect the traffic-shaping activities they use without special equipment and training."

"Comcast (doesn't) throttle on a user-by-user basis rather than a protocol-by-protocol basis, (as the company is) concerned with the privacy implications of that approach." Thats right folks, Comcast will sell network wiretaps to the feds for $1,000 a pop, but won't calculate a user's total bandwidth per month for "privacy reasons."

It's not really "undetectable" when even an average user notices that Bittorrent up- and downloads suffer. The average user may not notice the RST packets, but without a doubt he will realize that something weird is going on. The "it's ok if nobody can notice it" argument is pretty weak; even a shoplifter can say that.