Customers cry fraud over Comcast P2P meddling in new lawsuit

Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 07 June 2008
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Three class-action lawsuits were filed against Comcast this week in California, Illinois, and New Jersey, alleging that the company deceived and misled consumers by advertising that it offered "unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer."

In November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report detailing its own investigation, confirming that BitTorrent performance was being selectively degraded by unexpected TCP reset packets.

Comcast did not tell customers that it would engage in this type of traffic shaping when the company promised "unfettered access," and was not authorized to do so by its customers.

The city of Los Angeles has also announced that it is suing Time Warner Cable for deceptive business practices and false advertising.

Why is it so hard to be honest? If Comcast doesn't want unlimited usage, it should just say so. It could let people know that they have eg 10GB/month included, or just sell slower lines so you can't download as much. Then the customer can easily decide wheter or not he wants to sign up with Comcast, or go to another, better ISP. Oh wait, that's exactly the reason why they are lying. In these days Comcast can't really advertise with limits and caps, even though they want them so badly that they will do it by illegal means.