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Accused of interfering with the traffic towards certain
Internet file-sharing services, Comcast announced the restructuring of Internet
traffic management, thus handling all data equally and objectively.
Last November, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
received a complaint against Comcast from a coalition of public interest
groups. The company was accused of violating FCC policy by blocking
peer-to-peer Internet traffic.
The issue emerged after a simple test by the AP has found
that Comcast appears to interfere with the BitTorrent traffic in ways which
pose ethics questions and also probably cost the company a lot of money.
Specifically, instead of throttling BitTorrent traffic, the company appears to
create spoof peers which interfere with the normal peer-to-peer transfers and
significantly slow down or even kill some downloads. Furthermore, their test
has shown that Comcast appears to "impersonate" existing peers to
divert packets.
Although initially the company declared that it was not
breaking any of the principles of "net neutrality", it was eventually
forced to admit that it does indeed significantly slow down certain
peer-to-peer transfers. The move was considered to be necessary in order to
prevent the entire network from slowing down because of a few customers that
were uploading large amounts of data.
FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin expressed his concern that
Comcast may not change its practices very soon soon. “While it may take time to
implement its preferred new traffic management technique, it is not at all
obvious why Comcast couldn't stop its current practice of arbitrarily blocking
its broadband customers from using certain applications,” he said.
Within this same statement given on Thursday, Comcast
representatives also talked about the collaboration with BitTorrent. The two
companies have been working together on ways to improve BitTorrent applications
for the Comcast network, which, with more than 24 million subscribers, is the
largest cable TV and Internet provider in the U.S.
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