captsolo weblog

“You abuse the throttle, you should expect a ticket” [SiliconValley.com]

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s recommending that the commission punish Comcast for secretly interfering with BitTorrent file-sharing traffic.

Comcast has defended the throttling of users’ uploads as reasonable network traffic management, meant to benefit the majority of customers. But Martin’s investigation found Comcast was using the surreptitious technique more broadly and more arbitrarily than it claimed. “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” Martin said. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said he won’t seek any financial penalties, but he does want Comcast to stop the blocking, fill the commission in on how it was used, and clearly disclose to customer its network traffic management plans and policies.

BitTorrent is like other Internet data transfer technologies in that the technology itself does not dictate what it is used for. It has plenty of legitimate uses and internet providers can do better than knowingly lowering the quality of service provided, based on false assumptions.

In other news:

Many users in Europe and the U.S. are used to theyr internet providers limiting downloads at 10-40 Gigabytes per month and might consider themselves lucky if their download cap is more than 50 Gb ("that sure must be enough for everyone"). Compare that to Japan where NTT Communications has imposed an upload limit of ~300 Gb per month. Downloads are unlimited.