Comcast squares off against supporters of "Net Neutrality"

**Hairbautt** · 02-13-2008, 06:04 PM

"Under fire from consumer groups and law professors who have issued formal complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast has told the FCC that hampering some file-sharing by its subscribers was a justifiable way to keep Web traffic flowing for everyone."

"The groups say Comcast (the second-largest ISP in the U.S.) has breached the principle, known as "'Net Neutrality," of treating all Internet traffic equally. Comcast says it must curb some file-sharing traffic because some subscribers would otherwise hog the cables with their uploads and slow traffic in their neighborhood.

Comcast also said it was justified in using "reset" packets to break off communications between two computers. Comcast sometimes inserts these packets in the data stream to kill a file-sharing session. The move "fools" each computer into believing the other computer wants to end the connection. The return addresses of Comcast's packets indicate they're from one of the file-sharing computers when they are in fact from Comcast.

They also say the company was hampering movie downloading services because they might compete with Comcast's cable TV business."

Source: Neowin.Net

Reuters: Rep. Markey offers net-neutrality bill

**deepee** · 02-13-2008, 06:11 PM

is that sandvine? or a new technology?

**manicgeek** · 02-13-2008, 06:34 PM

Those sandvine products sound like it'll be simple enough to kill, it just becomes a case of people writing the code to run p2p over an ssl encrypted link... at which point their DPI will become worthless, then they'll be left having to use port based identification and it's easy enough to run p2p on the same ports as other legit services.. like VPN or ftp-data... they don't seem to get that if they engineer products to block something, someone somewhere will engineer around it.