Free Press, Public Knowledge, Media Access Project, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Professor Charles Nesson, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, Professor Barbara van Schewick, Center for Internet & Society, Stanford Law School, Petition for Declaratory Ruling, CC Docket Nos. 02-33, 01-337, 95-20, 98-10, GN Docket No. 00-185, CS Docket No. 02-52, WC Docket No. 07-52 (filed Nov. 1, 2007).
Vuze Petition (filed Nov. 14, 2007) (" asking for rules to prevent telephone and cable companies from blocking, degrading or unreasonably discriminating against legal Internet applications. ") PK Press Release " Vuze is a startup that provides high-quality video content using peer-to-peer technology that is working hard to attract licensed content partners for viewing while providing an innovative experience for its customers who want to upload their own video. "
One cable company to rule them all Salon 2004 (Comcast ... The company's terms of service also prohibit users from running file-sharing applications (among other things))
University Gets Tough On P2P InternetWeek Feb 2004 ("Campus residents can no longer use Kazaa, Morpheus or any other P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing software to download music, movies or software applications. The free lunch ended abruptly at the beginning of the 2003-04 school year, when network administrators working in the campus housing unit turned on software they developed that not only detects illicit network activity but also dynamically enforces acceptable-use policies without IT intervention.")
"This document is being written because there are a number of
firewalls in the Internet that inappropriately reset a TCP connection
upon receiving certain TCP SYN packets, in particular, packets with
flags set in the Reserved field of the TCP header. In this document
we argue that this practice is not conformant with TCP standards, and
is an inappropriate overloading of the semantics of the TCP reset.
We also consider the longer-term consequences of this and similar
actions as obstacles to the evolution of the Internet infrastructure."
Policy Traffic Switch: "helps service providers to better profit from application traffic. Our Deep Packet Inspection-Based Policy Solutions address key challenges such as managing bandwidth-intensive traffic, controlling malicious threats, enabling new services and identifying application quality trends. These subscriber-friendly solutions are deployed on a single intelligent platform to simplify the network architecture and ensure a fast return on investment.
"
Wikipedia: "a networking equipment company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Sandvine products implement network traffic shaping and policing, and include support for both blocking new and forcefully terminating established network connections. The company targets its product line at Internet Service Providers and states that it helps ISPs save on bandwidth costs by controlling connection quality of high-bandwidth users, e.g. the users of P2P file-sharing applications. Comcast is a high-profile customer of Sandvine who has come under fire from many subscribers experiencing degraded connection performance."
Anne Broache, FCC: We'll investigate Comcast-BitTorrent flap, CNET (Jan 8, 2008) (Kevin Martin at CES announcing that FCC will investigate, " "The question is going to arise: Are they reasonable network practices?" AP quoted Martin, a Republican, as saying. "When they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public." " )
Marguerite Reardon, Comcast denies monkeying with BitTorrent traffic, CNET (Aug 21, 2007) ("when I spoke to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas earlier today, he flat-out denied that the company was filtering or "shaping" any traffic on its network.")
An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems. We picked the Bible for the test because it's not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size. In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked. Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking. The Bible test was conducted with three other Internet connections. One was provided by Time Warner Inc.'s Time Warner Cable, and the other came from Cablevision Systems Corp. The third was the business-class connection to the AP's headquarters, provided by AT&T Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc. No signs of interference with file-sharing were detected in those tests. Further analysis of the transfer attempt from the Comcast-connected computer in the San Francisco area revealed that the failure was due to ''reset'' packets that the two computers received, carrying the return address of the other computer. Those packets tell the receiving computer to stop communicating with the sender. However, the traffic analyzer software running on each computer showed that neither computer actually sent the packets. That means they originated somewhere in between, with faked return addresses.
Peter Svensson (AP), Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic, SFGATE (Oct. 19, 2007) ("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.")
Seth Schoen, Comcast and BitTorrent, Electronic Frontier Foundation Blog, September 13, 2007,
