EFF: Comcast continues to block P-to-P

by Grant Gross

November 30, 2007 —

Comcast continues to slow down customers' connections to some P-to-P (peer-to-peer)
applications, using hacker-like techniques against its own subscribers, according
to a report
released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

But Comcast officials, first accused of blocking P-to-P application BitTorrent
and other traffic in an October Associated Press story, insisted they're not
stopping any Web traffic from getting to their customers. The cable broadband
provider does manage its network, which would slow to a crawl if it did not
manage bandwidth-hogging P-to-P connections during times of heavy congestion,
a company official said.

At times, Comcast will delay P-to-P traffic, but the traffic will eventually
go through, said Charlie Douglas, Comcast's director of corporate communications.

"Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web site or online
application, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise,"
Douglas said. "We engage in reasonable network management to serve all
of our customers with a good Internet experience."

But the EFF defined Comcast's actions differently. Comcast, the second largest
ISP (Internet service provider) in the U.S., uses a technique called packet
forgery to slow some subscriber traffic, the EFF said in a report released Thursday.
Comcast appears to be injecting RST, or reset, packets into customers' connections,
causing connections to close, the EFF said.

The EFF's own tests confirmed tests run by the Associated Press and others
that said Comcast was disrupting traffic, the group said. The packet forgery
techniques can cause several problems, depending on the applications a customer
is using, the EFF said.

"One objectionable aspect of Comcast's conduct is that they are spoofing
packets -- that is, impersonating parties to an exchange of data," the
EFF said in its report. "Comcast is essentially deploying against their
own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers (this is doubtless
how Comcast would characterize other parties that forged traffic to make it
appear that it came from Comcast)."

Comcast's action is worse than if it dropped a proportion of packets during
times of congestion, the EFF said. "Comcast is essentially behaving like
a telephone operator that interrupts a phone conversation, impersonating the
voice of each party to tell the other that 'this call is over, I'm hanging up,'"
the group said.

The EFF report suggests that Comcast was not just slowing P-to-P traffic but
also access to IBM's Lotus Notes e-mail and calendaring software. Douglas denied
this, saying a bug that caused problems in Notes happened at the same that Comcast
was accused of blocking Web traffic.

Comcast's actions have led supporters of net neutrality rules to renew calls
for the U.S. Congress to pass a law prohibiting broadband providers from blocking
or slowing Web traffic. Comcast's slowing of traffic creates a situation where
Web innovators would have to ask permission for their applications to get unfettered
access to broadband networks, the EFF said.

"The Internet has enabled a cascade of innovations precisely because any
programmer -- whether employed by a huge corporation, a startup, or tinkering
at home for fun -- has been able to create new protocols and applications that
operate over TCP/IP, without having to obtain permission from anyone,"
the EFF said. "By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with
TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are
the foundation of the Internet."

In addition to the Comcast report, the EFF has published a guide
for broadband customers to test if their providers are slowing traffic.

IDG News Service