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Comcast deal hit by a torrent of criticism - March 31, 2008

It's been a slow news day so Media Wonk has been catching up on some of the commentary addressed to the deal announced last week between Comcast and BitTorrent to develop new, application-agnostic network management practices. Although the companies got generally good notices reviews from traditional media outlets, many in the blogosphere were dismissive of the deal, often stridently so, seeing it as little more than window dressing to try to distract the FCC, which is investigating Comcast's current practice of throttling some upstream BitTorrent traffic at times of peak volume.

A lot of the criticism struck Media Wonk as overly harsh and dogmatic, or worse, based on sloppy or inadequate reporting. And at any rate it overlooked important elements in the deal, including some that could prove more problematic than the smug dismissals of the deal understand.

Here's what I think will be important in the long run, for better and worse:

• Comcast's commitment to an application-agnostic approach to network management means the focus will be on the user and users' behavior. This is consistent with the growing interest in some network and policy circles in metering individuals' bandwidth use and then charging for the amount used, thus creating a market-based mechanism for allocating a scarce resource. While that may make a certain amount of sense, it would make more sense in an environment where bandwidth providers faced real competition so that consumers could exert real market pressure on pricing--an environment we don't currently enjoy in the U.S.
• The focus on individual users' behavior also has echoes to a movement outside the U.S., particularly in Europe but also in Japan, to monitor individual's Internet use for the purpose of detecting illegal downloads. While Comcast has given no indication that it would snoop into what its subscribers are using their bandwidth for, the high correlation between bandwidth consumption and, for instance, illegal movie downloads, will inevitably turn those subscribers with the highest bandwidth charges into suspects. Over time, the pressure from content owners (and regulators?) to apply special scrutiny to high bandwidth users could become difficult (or expensive) for network operators to resist.
• The commitment by Comcast and BitTorrent to publish the results of their collaboration in open forums and standards bodies is a very hopeful and important sign. While some may be skeptical that Comcast will follow through on its commitment, BitTorrent has every incentive to be as open as possible. If it's to develop as a platform for the distribution of licensed content, it needs its application to run as efficiently as possible across all networks. Publishing their work will also give other application developers transparency into how network operators are managing traffic so they, too, can optimize their software. Critics of the deal have demanded firm commitments to act immediately, but in the long run, a collaborative process in open forums is likely to do far more to advance the science of traffic management.
• The companies' commitment to collaborate on ways to make BitTorrent run more efficiently on Comcast's network mirrors similar work being pursued by telco ISPs with other P2P providers through the P4P Working Group. The growing willingness of both network operators and P2P networks to stand down from their often tense relationship in favor of collaboration--and to recognize both that P2P is here to stay and that the Internet was not designed to distribute rich media and that accommodations must be made--can only be a good sign.

Yes, I know. Comcast and BitTorrent Inc. are profit-seeking corporations whose motives are never pure. And as I've suggested before, the prospect of an imminent regulatory hanging no doubt helped spur the discussions that led to last week's agreement. So in that sense, we owe the progress to the FCC and those who filed the initial petitions that triggered its investigation.

But it's just silly to suggest the deal is meaningless or that it can't lead to substantive outcomes. Just by announcing the agreement, Comcast and BitTorrent have added momentum to the growing collaboration between network operators and application developers. It's also added momentum to the shift toward basing network policy on the behavior of individual users, rather than particular uses--a shift that will need to be thought through carefully and openly.

We may not all like the outcome of that process, but it certainly would be a significant result.
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