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Comcast throttles down - October 25, 2007

As a Comcast high-speed Internet customer who doesn't do a lot of file-sharing I have to admit to some smirking satisfaction at the news that the company has been managing bandwidth by throttling BitTorrent traffic. I pay a godawful amount of money for my broadband connection (considering how much I already pay Comcast for digital cable service) and I want every byte of bandwidth I can get for my money. Since I use a cable modem, I'm actually sharing my connection with other Comcast customers, so when they start uploading or downloading some fool TV show or movie, it impinges on me. I want Comcast to throttle them.

On the other hand, if it were my applications being throttled, I'd be tempted to follow the example of my fellow DC-area Comcast customer, 75-year old Mona Shaw, who, after several missed service appointments by Comcast technicians and appalling treatment at the company's Manassas, Va, customer service center, returned the next day with a hammer and smashed up the place.

The ideal situation, of course, would be for me and my BitTorrent-y fellow customers to have a choice: A broadband service that didn't get clogged up with a lot of file-sharing traffic; or another service that doesn't discriminate among bits.

Here in the land of free enterprise, however, we mere citizens don't have that sort of choice. We have, at best, a choice between two, minimally acceptable alternatives, cable and DSL, each of which offers a service that is generations behind broadband service in much of the rest of the developed world.

Because we lack choices, as consumers there is no way to exert market forces on broadband suppliers, short of going all Mona Shaw on them. That makes Comcast's decision as to which applications to throttle and which to favor entirely arbitrary. In this  its decision was also entirely opaque, since the company didn't tell anyone what it was doing and tried to deny it even after being caught out.

It's hard to imagine a situation that could more clearly cry out for regulation. Unless and until consumers have a meaningful choice in broadband providers, I certainly don't want a company you literally have to hit with a hammer to get some attention from making arbitrary and undisclosed decisions about which applications I can use freely. At a minimum, I want to know when and how I'm to be throttled.

That's not to say there is no irony in Comcast becoming the poster child for Net neutrality regulation. Comcast was a rare holdout among the major ISPs from the MPAA's efforts to persuade broadband providers to filter "unauthorized" content from their networks. And topping the list of applications the studios would like to see filtered is BitTorrent.

Comcast says it was nothing personal toward BitTorrent, that it was just managing traffic on its network according to demand. Maybe so. But if true, it merely demonstrates that the confluence of interests between the content companies concerned about copyright, and network providers trying to cope with finite bandwidth, is slready pushing the industry toward a de facto filtering.


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