Geeklawyer spotted this news story about Comcast throttling bittorrent traffic. Geeklawyer does, on occasion, ‘steal’ films using bittorrent. Really, it’s not like anyone suffers (please, spare me the crap about ‘he would have bought it if it hadn’t been available on p2p’) and he certainly isn’t the only IP/IT lawyer to do so.While many would like to ascribe this to the MPAA-RIAA acting behind the scenes Geeklawyer thinks that this story has the flavour of truth. It is certainly the case that ISPs are flattened by the demands of p2p traffic; some say 80% of Internet traffic is torrent.
It may be that the shortage is ISPs capacity problems and probably it is. So then, just widen the pipes? But like road building where the more motorways one builds the more people use them until capacity usage is 101% would this solve the problem? Geeklawyer suspect the answer is no, but also that the motorway analogy is flawed. Like motorways, network backbones cost real big bucks to build & particularly over the last mile. The scalability of the problem is not equally comparable however. Even copper, let alone fibre, is capable of vast capability once exchanges are updated. And if one looks at wireless technologies such as wiMax then the capability of 100Mbytes+ over the last mile look easily plausible.
All of this requires huge funding. And if the Internet age is to realise its potential then consumers such as you and Geeklawyer should expect to have to dig into their pockets. Geeklawyer is willing to do so so long as it goes to infrastructure improvement. He imagines most consumers feel likewise. Furthermore like Victorian water mains there is a good argument that National Government should stump up some massive investment to aid this. Yes of course government providing services for the public good is a quaint concept: everything is about profit rather than the public good, but here the two are not incompatible.
Update: Comcast deny throttling Bittorrent. Though some say that they are lying.
I don’t get this — you pay for a service, namely a 5mb connection (for example), except you never (ever) get that service. Why can’t ISPs just be honest and say “well, it could go up to 5mb, but really you’ll be lucky to top out at 200kb, if that”.
I don’t mind if ISPs want to restrict downloading etc, providing they’re upfront about it from the start.
I’m signed up to eclipse and I pay for the service I use. As I am on their lowest tariff, in peak hours (ie: evening) my internet connection is snail-slow, during the rest of the day it’s reasonable. I don’t mind because that is the service I signed up for. What I would mind is signing up to a service and only finding out that they were restricting my bandwidth when I then couldn’t do anything about it.
What seems unfair here is that comcast just started restricting it without telling anyone. If they are worried about people using up bandwidth unfairly, which is reasonable, they should set up a cheap tariff that makes it clear that it is cheap because it is restrictive. If they are worried about bandwidth only because of cost (which, as this is capitalism, would be a prime reason, I’m sure) then they should simply charge people a higher tariff to have priority on the bandwidth in busy periods.
Maybe they need to go back to Econ 101 and redo the lecture on supply and demand…
(ps: your spam filter is decidedly unfair to people who’ve had far too much to drink and, to her eternal shame, had to think about it for a while.)
I’m always surprised to see corporate/litigation lawyers and suchlike so angered by these things, so I must be at fault, so edify me…
a) Just because I buy a train ticket doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want on that train. Just because I’ve got access to the internet doesn’t mean I can download whatever I can. Just because I’ve got a car doesn’t mean I can drive wherever I want, however I like. We’re quite aware of these restrictions and, when we’re not, there’s usually some hoo-hah but we eventually accept (most) of them. I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, but we know them, or we work them out. But mainly let’s not confuse crappy service/bandwidth provision with strategic throttling.
b) Is it really so wrong that ISPs want to stop you downloading 10GB of movies every night? Let’s see:
b.1) You don’t own those movies. ISPs don’t know that, but it’s just common sense to net admins that if you’re downloading gigs of data, it ain’t yours. So who’s going to argue that loud? You’re not, unless you actively want to attract the attention of the RIAA et al. You can even make the case that ISPs are protecting you from yourself… freaky.
b.2) ISPs operate the same economics as anything else. They make money from you, and some tiny fraction of that gets invested in expansion/enhanced provision. But not much. Also, if you pay the same every month but your bandwidth just keeps rising to gigs and gigs a month, you’re getting increasingly more for the same outlay. Good for you, bad for them. And they’ve got the pipe tap in their hands. Which way do you think they’ll swing?
c) Massive govt infrastructural investment would most likely come under the perview of the EU, and would be seen as anti-competitive, and disallowed, with a fine. This exact thing was the issue back in 2001/2:
http://thepitcanary.blogspot.com/
So you’re going to have to leave it to companies. Now, you come up with a business case for massive investment in last-mile tech, when councils are doing it for them with local wifi, e.g., and I’ll come round and give you my dollar. You can’t find one? Let’s see why…
d) Talking of regulation, one of the many reasons the UK has crappy last-mile technology is because for years Oftel/Ofcom barred BT from slashing prices and thereby dominating the market and bothering to throw money at last-mile upgrades, because it wasn’t allowed to abuse its monopoly. So instead we got crappy dial-up for years under the guise of competition, broadband from services that could barely afford to operate while paying BT for the privelege while BT slowly, slowly upgraded exchanges, because, like, why bother, and cable providers that started out as a cartel and are now back to a monopoly which of course Virgin isn’t abusing at all.
e) What future there was for alternatives, i.e. mobile phone providers, threw vast amounts of cash into network expansion but were horribly stymied by titanic and completely arbitrary licence fees. This horror was then compounded by mobile telcos’ utter inability to get what people would want on these networks. No one wants video calling, and music downloads to phones is still nascent.
e.2) However, with HSDPA, it’s now possible to deliver ~1.6Mbps to mobile devices, and that’ll keep rising till the protocol’s full at around 7Mbps in a couple of years, perhaps earlier. Can’t remember. And, in a lot of urban places, with an HSDPA modem that’s not being moved around, you can easily match DSL. Already. So why haven’t 3/Orange/Voda/T-Mobile et al bought static HSDPA modems, sold them to home buyers as truly wireless broadband and bundled phones onto them? Because they’re stupid. Even Orange can’t get that right, and it’s trying hard. It’s bogged by sometimes shocking customer service, too.
And we’re still moaning about not being able to use whatever we want on ISPs that have little to no incentive to drive traffic capabilities up, and every reason to missell. Why moan about not getting what you thought when we should be moaning about:
1) Usage caps. Pathetic, insulting levels of 2GB a month. Insane, and only in place to make money from people who bust them.
2) Misselling. Take some of these people to court. Find a firm that’ll do it pro bono. Or something. Or do the work for a digital rights group.
3) Revive the Big Brother awards in the UK, and point them in the direction of Googe and telcos. They no longer exist here. Why? Because no one cared, no one helped, and no one donated enough.
4) Free our data. Annoying and bit dull but Cross’s work in the Grauniad is essential in this, strangely — make public data accessible and let corps/people make cash/useful stuff from it, and councils will see the need to wifi enable everywhere, for next to free (paid for by CTAX).
5) (insert your view here)
Sorry, it’s a slow week. Felt the need for that.
Your surprise is surprising and you are, mostly, wrong.
You are right in one one respect: When I dreamt of government intrusion I was living in the halcyon days when government regarded its job as providing an infrastructure for a developed liberal structured and enlightened society marching towards the sun dappled foothills of Utopia. Modern government is of course about the nothing so comically naive, it is the incidental by-product of the vocational lusts of our betters. You are right: any mechanism by which Government could introduce optical, or such-like, pipes into domestic property would be, probably, unlawful or impractical. Would that it were not.
I am disappointed by such a gifted journalist as yourself engaging easy & lame analogies with trains and I will resist the urge to pull them apart. However: when you buy ‘unlimited’ Internet access unless you are aware of any caveats you are entitled to use, or expect to use, the ‘unlimited’ services within your normal pattern of domestic usage. For virtually all homes the ability to watch BBC’s iPlayer/YouTube/bit-torrent are reasonable expectations. They just form part of the modern Internet experience. Sure some more savvy users, e.g. you, understand the policy difficulties and loko fro the small print but no-one reads it, including me usually. All the “Unlimited Internet access” packages only refer to usage caps in the small print at the bottom of the page — underneath the 60 point type saying ‘Unlimited Internet use’ accompanied by hi-res full motion video of movies.
And this is deliberate. So you are unequivocally wrong: almost all people don’t understand any limits and the absence of a clear plain-English explanation by Virgin/ISPs that torrents/iPlayer are unacceptable is unacceptable.
Your idea that ISPs throttle because of copyright infringement is equally wrong. Firstly all, and I do mean all, UK ISPs would scream with horror at the idea that they should become responsible for managing activities that could be infringing, whether by bit-torrent/Usenet/FTP/whatever. They will not thank you for imposing this justification on them. If they can do it then on your proposition the MPAA-RIAA will insist that they then have a duty to do so on pain of contributory infringement. further you discount the huge legitimate use of bit-torrent — I download 2/3Gig ISOs of Linux distributions and legal movies. YouTube amounts to a vast lawful use of content. When IPlayer becomes more prevalent it will swamp illegal use.
Which brings us to your third point: the ISP economy. In this respect you are right. these are businesses that operate in market where their desirability depends on available content torrent/illegal/legal. Pardon me if I dont weep tears for their misjudgment. Just as mobile operator payed too much for 3G because of bidding hysteria neither can I be sympathetic for ISPs who sell full motion-HD video but deliver dial-up.
Your point on regulation is well taken: damned if you do damned if you don’t. The problem remains is that we do not have a genuinely competitive market. BT remains dominant. Market forces are important but you infer, I think, that I am saying that if BT had retained heir monopoly they would have developed the infrastructure. Nothing could be further from the truth. The profits they made were, and would have, been diverted to shareholders and not put into the last mile. But as you say now they are in the position where they cannot do so. We are now in the necessary, and even desirable, mess of a more free market.
This is not a trivial problem and I don’t profess to know the answer. Ultimately I suspect it comes to this. People are not prepared to pay commercial rates for uncapped rates but they will coerce ISPs to upgrade pipes until unrestricted 20/30/100Mb access is available. This will need to be reflected in pricing.
HSDPA is a nice idea, and I use it myself, but it remains problematic and not a great domestic solution, indeed Orange et-al couldn’t sell water to Arabs & they suffer from the essential capacity planning issues BT etc do. IF everyone in the UK used HSDPA their networks would collapse at least as fast, but with higher bills.
I completely agree on Big Brother wards. Also on ‘Free our data’ issues (Ordnance Survey maps, public surveys etc) — though the issues are also a little more complex and I am vulnerable to accusations of being a socialist anarchist here too.
I repeat: this world will not be free and perfect until I have the arbitrary power of life and amusing death, the unquestioned tyrant: The Peoples Tyrant.
There are similarities with the rail network. Both networks are run by feckless private companies who due to market economics will not/cannot invest in the infrastructure.
“Your surprise is surprising and you are, mostly, wrong”: Hmm.
As I recall, I said I was surprised to see legal people so angered by it, not surprised at legal people not understanding it. After all, it’s your peers who write this small print, and people like you who argue them out. Oh, and, unless you’ve had a humour bypass recently (always a possibility on this blog), you’ll have noticed a trace or so of irony in the lead-in. And I fully expected some childish patronising, so don’t worry about having offended
Right, let’s address these points one at a time.
I start off being right about infrastructural investment as government subsidisation. I feel good about that.
In re the trains, I think you’re mixing up an analogy between infrastructures/networks (which I wasn’t making) and one between usage policies on networks (which I was). There are all sorts of rules about travelling on trains, and they occasionally make the news, but they exist when you buy tickets and 99% of people never read any of the rules, while regularly using the system. They only find out they’ve broken them when they get caught, for example. I was saying that such things are a fact of life, not ‘right’. Hence my ‘surprise’ at the level of ire – I’d expect this to be old news to you. Imho, there’s a fairly good analogy between “But I thought buying a ticket meant I was getting a seat!” and “But I thought unlimited broadband meant taking the whole traffic quota for my local exchange!”. Imho, I should get a seat for my ticket. But I don’t.
In re unlimited internet – indeed, I agree that, imho, it’s misselling. I said at the end of my post that this is the thing we should be addressing. So not exactly ‘wrong’ on that one, methinks.
“Your idea that ISPs throttle because of copyright infringement is equally wrong”: I didn’t say that, it would be bonkers to suggest that. I said at the start let’s not confuse crappy service (which imo includes unannounced bandwidth restrictions, e.g.) with strategic throttling. Why strategic? Because it explains another error in your statement, linked to my point about ISPs:
“For virtually all homes the ability to watch BBC’s iPlayer/YouTube/bit-torrent are reasonable expectations. They just form part of the modern Internet experience”: I think it’s naïve to lump BitTorrent in with YouTube, and incorrect for the following reason.
You’ll notice that app-specific bandwidth caps like that on BT don’t happen to YouTube et al. It’s strategically easier to throttle p2p systems, because unlike YouTube/iTunes/internet radio/iPlayer (yeah, right) they are generally not used for legit purposes. If you watched a lot of porn using RealPlayer, e.g., this also, generally, wouldn’t be happening to you. When I said “net admins” I didn’t mean that ISPs are managing illicit downloads – I meant that when deciding which apps/traffic hogs you hit, it’s always a good call to go with ones that you can say are often hooky. YouTube et al are part of the modern Internet experience, and capping them (specifically) would be marketing suicide. BitTorrent users, however, have the stats, and the odds, stacked against them – they are generally on the dodge. Sorry. Which leads me to:
“further you discount the huge legitimate use of bit-torrent — I download 2/3Gig ISOs of Linux distributions and legal movies. YouTube amounts to a vast lawful use of content.”
Indeed YouTube does, though there is an army of lawyers that’d argue the fine points with you re YT. However the stuff about Linux distros is cant, man. Most Torrent traffic is pirated content. You don’t represent the average user, and if you’re downloading 3 gigs of Linux distros a night, you need to get out more.
“When IPlayer becomes more prevalent it will swamp illegal use”: Possibly. Let’s wait and see.
“Which brings us to your third point: the ISP economy. In this respect you are right. these are businesses that operate in market where their desirability depends on available content torrent/illegal/legal. Pardon me if I dont weep tears for their misjudgment”: I wasn’t. Like in most of my post, I was pointing out what I see as a reality, which itself defines often foolish corporate behaviour. I wasn’t standing up for them, and I feel that was more obvious than you’re making out.
“Market forces are important but you infer, I think, that I am saying that if BT had retained heir monopoly they would have developed the infrastructure”: Nope, I’m saying that I think that had BT’s entry into a deregulated market had been handled differently, it might have been better driven to develop the networks AND been very competitive. Sadly, like most privatisations (yeah, I’m thinking about trains again!), it wasn’t.
“HSDPA is a nice idea, and I use it myself, but it remains problematic and not a great domestic solution. IF everyone in the UK used HSDPA their networks would collapse at least as fast, but with higher bills”: Sorry, this is plain wrong. HSDPA is, depending on which telco you use and where, cracking. And if everyone used it, it would provide a straightforward business case for network investment and provide the cash to do it. So no, it wouldn’t produce that result. In fact, serious scientists have, in the past, come up with very similar solutions to total-wireless countrywide internet.
“I completely agree on Big Brother wards. Also on ‘Free our data’ issues (Ordnance Survey maps, public surveys etc) — though the issues are also a little more complex and I am vulnerable to accusations of being a socialist anarchist here too”: Nah, just a libertarian.
. But I’m counting the wrongs vs rights here and “mostly wrong” just isn’t cutting it.
Right! Finally:
“This is not a trivial problem and I don’t profess to know the answer. Ultimately I suspect it comes to this. People are not prepared to pay commercial rates for uncapped rates but they will coerce ISPs to upgrade pipes until unrestricted 20/30/100Mb access is available. This will need to be reflected in pricing”: I think this is the key issue. I said if you come up with a viable business model, you can have my dollar. You haven’t. What I meant was:
I kind of outlined a couple of market realities as I see them, but from a hack’s point of view. Fundamentally, ISPs/comms providers find themselves in an interesting position. They have a chokehold on a consumer comms ‘need’, and are now exploiting it. It’s not in their interest to allow you to hog pipes with data that doesn’t have monetisation possibilities. And, at the end of the day, it’s really simple: Torrent users are the new Napsterites, so don’t expect anyone to sympathise! Oh, and I’m not backing that view; obviously I’d never download illicit content, but I may have inhaled some once…
Since you are obviously having a bad week so I shall go easy on you
Imho, there’s a fairly good analogy between “But I thought buying a ticket meant I was getting a seat!” and “But I thought unlimited broadband meant taking the whole traffic quota for my local exchange!”.
Really there are numerous situations where this is true and the public are aware of limitations in service. As you say trains is one of them. The other is “all you can eat” lunch deals where you know its all carbohydrates a starchy gut fillers, but I maintain that I am right and you are wrong. While savvy tech journalists geeks and lawyers might understand the small print, the average domestic user really doesn’t understand this when they sign up for ‘unlimited’ broadband. I may be wrong, perhaps there is evidence of consumer awareness but I’ve not seen it.
The whole net neutrality/monetization of data thing is very tricky and I’m not sure I have a firm view: though I suspect I veer to the neutral end.
You say throttling YouTube would be mad but it is a technical issue and BitTorrent is an easy target — yea for now, but there are hacks in the works. Actually I fully retract the YouTube ‘being mostly legal’ bit. A large chunk of it currently isn’t but I suspect it will be at some point, as a matter of legal necessity from Google’s perspective.
In France, an ISP was also accused of throttling access to DailyMotion to put pressure on the video-sharing website to pay more for higher bandwidth usage.
Both companies eventually issued statements diplomatically attributing the lower connection speeds to a technical glitch.
My big issue with comcast is that they completely blocked some content they didn’t like while advertising that you could get everything from them you got from their competitors, only faster.
I don’t care if the content they blocked is bad/evil/wicked/nasty and nobody should ever transmit or receive it. Censors *always* think those things about the content they block. Whether they’re right or wrong in how bad the content is doesn’t change the fact that in blocking seeding they blocked content they didn’t like.
I don’t care if they “shape” their data. Optimization of data flow is strictly necessary to computer network operations. They have to, for all practical purposes.
I don’t care if they block seeding or any other content *as long as they announce they’re doing it*. That way, if I don’t like the product they’re selling me, I can go down the street to the other guy’s shop and buy *his* service. What if seeding is more important to me than speed?
Evils in bureaucracy and government seldom happen as a sudden slap in the face. They creep up on you through bad precedent. Slippery slopes are very real.
The only thing that would “hurt” Comcast about telling the truth is that some subscribers might go down the street and buy the other’s guy’s service instead.
There’s a difference between ethical self interest and unethical self interest. Materially misrepresenting your product is unethical self interest.
Comcast has every right to sell whatever service it wants to sell. Comcast has every obligation that its material representations about what that product is and is not must be accurate.
Amen to that Julie, amen.