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Comcast Blocks File-Trading



How a web service provider expects to survive while denying people its services is beyond me. Sounds like they could use a few lessons in intent/action harmony.

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

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.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.







3 Reader Responses

  1. Svenson Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    Comcast has been trying similar things for a long time. I remember installing the CD that came with the service a long time ago, and it actually screwed up your computer so it couldn’t run servers of anykind, even just serving pages to yourself. I also wrote a server that my brothers freinds started using to share files, and comcast figured it out and blocked the port it was running on.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    Yeah, I think we need to see a real return to local ISP’s. It’s too bad that so many of them were so forcibly smashed during the dotcom boom buyout of local service providers.

  3. Svenson Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    Yeah, you don’t even have a choice in a lot of places. I mean in Seattle you had Speakeasy or whatever, but its really kind of a luxury to even have them available.



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