We’ve long held the belief that the duopoly’s problem with P2P has never been about taking the moral high road and protecting copyright holders. Rather it’s been about constraining the use of bandwidth with copyright infringement a paper tiger. With the explosive growth of legit P2P, we’re bettting the tune they are singning will have to change:

A number of startups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology and have convinced some big-name media companies to use them to deliver legal content.

“In 2005 when we met with content owners, ‘peer-to-peer’ was a dirty word,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. “In 2007, finally, content owners came and said ‘Yeah, we think there’s a role for P2P.’”

Levitan was speaking Friday at the first “P2P Market Conference” of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more than 100 members.

Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It’s providing the means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. (Yahoo News)

Comcast’s tactics have gotten downright comical lately. From blocking public access to hearing halls with hired seat fillers, to quoting a misinformed congresswomen on technology, the Comcast spin machine seems to be just as incompetent as their customer service department. Now, they are opposing attempts to map rural broadband coverage because it presents a “terror threat”:

There’s several laws being debated in Congress that would work on mapping and shoring up rural broadband deployment. One of them would require carriers to pony up this data so that the country could finally know precisely who offers service, where, and at what speed. Comcast, in opposition to this bill, this week insisted that they can’t provide deployment data because terrorists could attack:

“9/11 wasn’t that long ago. We don’t want to make it easier for them to take out the network.” He added that the legislation requiring fuller disclosure could point to where vital public safety resources were, particularly in the wireless network. (from Broadband Reports)

Fact: by their nature, terrorists prefer densely populated areas to amplify the impact of their attacks. I’ll grant that the vast majority of the members of congress are either gullible or just pain stupid enough to accept Comcast’s arguments. That’s the true tragedy in the making. Neither Comcast or the US government are going to behave properly because we ask the to. We need to fire them. We need to open the access market to real competition and and we need to elect new representatives to make it happen.

Our friends at Comcast have been spending a little time trying to put a positive spin on their network management practices for the inquiring minds at the FCC. If I were one of the inquiring minds, right now I would have a headache.

Following the coverage from the blogosphere, I can offer a few more the more troubling revelations. From from The Register:

Comcast explains that its BitTorrent busting is “not based on the content of the files users are sharing or the identity of the users who are doing the sharing.” And it’s responsible for all those italics.

More on Comcast to FCC: redefining reasonable and consistent

In a pretty crafty move, Verizon’s EVP has stated they will not interfere with the movement of bit torrent bits, but reserve the right to do so in the future. This is clearly a marketing salvo fired at chief broadband and pay TV rivals Comcast and Time Warner. It almost feels like a little competition is brewing!

Verizon Communications doesn’t currently block or slow down peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like BitTorrent on its broadband network, but it can’t rule out doing so in the future, a company vice president said Monday.

The comments by Verizon executive vice president Tom Tauke arrive as Comcast has taken heat for throttling BitTorrent traffic in the name of “reasonable network management” and as the Federal Communications Commission is studying whether Internet service providers should be permitted to manipulate P2P traffic. Consumer interest groups have asked the FCC to declare that “degrading peer-to-peer traffic” violates the FCC’s Internet policy statement, which says consumers can generally use the applications and access the Web sites of their choosing, with an exception for “reasonable network management.”

Tauke, for his part, said Verizon has “more robust” networks than its cable competitors, in part because its customers have direct lines to their homes, rather than sharing capacity with the rest of their block or neighborhood.

Because of that set-up, “we see no need at the current time to slow peer-to-peer traffic,” Tauke said in response to a reporter’s question during a roundtable discussion at the company’s offices here.(from Cnet)

More than a few Comcast cutomers are likely to make the switch to Verizon as a result of this statement. Comcast left themselves wide open for this. I’ll bet the email from Comcast stockholders to management really stings right now.

With Comcast updating their TOS and AT&T announcing their to filter traffic they suspect may be in violation of copyright you might believe they can’t do too much more to limit your use of the net. Unfortunately, that is not the case. They may also be preparing to block and/or degrade the quality of VoIP.

A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype’s “call” button, Narus’s software, installed on the carrier’s network, swoops into action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even identify the specific software being used, such as Skype’s.

Narus’s software can “secure, analyze, monitor, and mediate any traffic in an IP network,” says Antonio Nucci, the company’s chief technology officer. By “mediate” he means block, or otherwise interfere with, data packets as they travel through the network in real time.

In the United States and many other countries, a phone company’s common carrier status prevents it from blocking potentially competitive services.

“But there’s nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn’t good,” Thomas says. “So the user will either pay for the carrier’s voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it.”

U.S. broadband-cable companies are considered information services, which by law gives them the right to block VoIP calls. Comcast Corp., in Philadelphia, the country’s largest cable company, is already a Narus customer; Thomas declined to say whether Comcast uses the VoIP-blocking capabilities.

In August, a Federal Communications Commission ruling gave phone companies the same latitude for DSL. (from IEEE Spectrum)

VoIP is the one service that broadband enables that annoys duopoly executives the most. They will certainly test the waters in limiting it’s use on thier networks. Current law allows them to block VoIP. In Comcast’s case, they have the tools to do it. It’s not a matter of if they will use them, it’s when. The FCC needs to retract the August ruling for DSL and create similar rules for all broadband access.

It seems that Comcast may finally be reacting to all of the scrutiny that they have been coming under for bandwidth “management”. They recently revised their TOS:

According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast “uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.” The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that “all major” ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of “spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service” and to “deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers.”

The revised language exactly mirrors that of the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement, which allows ISPs to engage in “reasonable network management.” At the same time, subscribers are entitled to run lawful applications and services, access their choice of lawful content, and hook up any hardware as long as it doesn’t harm the network. (from Ars Technica)

While not exactly transparent or forthcoming, the new TOS does appear to give some legitimacy to their throttling activites. The demand for bandwidth for legitimate purposes will soon eclipse illicit bit torrent and trying to manage that will be like trying to manage the path of a tornado. Less mentally challenged management would see that buildng adequate bandwidth instead of trying to micro manage inadequate bandwidth would be a wiser investment. Conventional wisdom is that arrogance has taken the place of wisdom on the Comcast management team.

In an era when technology has lowered bar for entry into production and distribution of media, the big media continues to take ever more draconian measures to force their dead business model on an unwilling public. More and more legitimate distribution of media is happening on the internet using the same technologies like peer to peer that the old media seeks to block. Some network providers like AT&T have given in to old media pressure and publicly stated they will take measures to control P2P file sharing that as to presume all of it is illicit. Now, Western Digital has installed software on certain network hard drives that will verify if a user has the “rights” to media content before allowing access. Not only is this impossible to know what is licensed and what is not, it is handing control of your storage over to Hollywood and the music industry without your informed consent.

“The company has started out very conservatively in creating a certain set of features and functions,” Brian Miller, director of marketing for Western Digital, told InformationWeek. “As we go forward, the goal is to listen to what the marketplace needs and wants, and identify the most appropriate solution that respects intellectual property.”

Some people, however, see the issue differently, criticizing Western Digital for deciding on its own what customers can do with their own content, since there’s no way for the company to know whether files are being shared illegally or not. “This is the most extreme example I’ve seen yet of tech companies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood,” said Gary, whose comment was posted on BoingBoing by blogger Cory Doctorow. (from Information Week)

There is a very important point that is being missed in this debate. Hollywood and the recording industry’s business models are based on the control of distribution. Big media not only wants to charge you again and again every time you want to use the same media on a different device, they also want to control the distribution of all content - not just the content that they own - but also all independently produced content. If the old media are successful in placing locked gates on our networks and our storage devices, not only will we have to pay a toll to access our media, independent producers will have to distribute only through the old media’s channel.

As long as we have choices, we can fight this. I for one, will not buy any Western Digital product. Join me in this and we’ll see how long their shareholders will tolerate letting Hollywood run their company.

Our so very tech illiterate, good for nothing that is good congress is at it again. Isn’t it time for their month long holiday recess yet? With so much news about dirty tricks to manage net traffic by Comcast and others, many of our “representatives” are determined to grab attention by passing new laws. Very bad idea. Most new laws regulating commerce declare someone a winner, and it is never the consumer. How about open competition? Sure, in totally open markets bad stuff happens, but in the end the consumer has more choices, and service providers are more compelled to satisfy them. If a company is behaving very badly, the consumer votes with their feet and puts them out of business. The problem with open markets for politicians is there is no special interest to serve, and no one collect protection money from. And there is no way to win elections by promising to protect consumers who are much better at doing it for themselves. By they way Congress, the way we stretch the application of existing law, I think the 1st amendment has net neutrality covered. (article on Cnet)

I predict if we get a “net neutrality” law from our Congress, it will result in a network managed with a heavy hand. Here’s a glimpse of what “net neutrality” as defined by congress could bring us:

Jonathan Zittrain, who has written a book due out in April called The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It, gave a public talk on the issue Wednesday night at CNET’s offices here. News.com hosted the talk–a first for our newsroom. The event, which drew 120 people, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can call Zittrain’s theme the AOL-ization of technology. Instead of personal computers being able to run any program from any source without approval from a third party–which many of us were used to in the 1980s and 1990s–Zittrain fears we’re entering a world where centralized approval becomes necessary. (also from Cnet)

If you think central management is a great idea, go spend a few days in Cuba. I think you’ll change your mind.

So much was said about traffic shaping and using packet forgery to block P2P by Comcast and others in months passed. Nothing has been do to stop the practice, and the story has faded as old news in the tech media.

It was recently discovered that Comcast was using forged TCP/IP packets to throttle upstream p2p bandwidth. While the Associated Press got credit for the discovery, it was actually one of our forum users that first uncovered the practice. In fact, site user Robb Topolski had already discovered how to thwart the systemdoing something similar. (from Broadband Reports)

You can help keep the net free of forged packed to “manage traffic” by helping keep watch on your ISP. The EFF can help. They have a published a guide for using Wireshark to test for ISP tomfoolery.

My fellow Texan Mark Cuban has been something of a maverick since the days long before he owned a basketball team bearing the same name, and became an cable and movie mogul. We were quite proud of him in days almost forgotten, before he lost his maverick soul. In fact it was the sale of his earlier enterprise Broadcast.com that made his entry into the class of moneyed elitists possible. It is also a fact that Broadcast.com was considered to be a major bandwidth hog by most ISP’s in its heyday for streaming content. That was way back when most of us were using dial up, and ISP’s didn’t like the streaming versus static content because of the heavier traffic load. There were also copyright issues that eventually sank Broadcast.com, but that was shortly after Yahoo paid a highly inflated price for the firm.
Once media maverick, now advocate insuring the position of old media, here are some recent quotes from Mr. Cuban’s blog:

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are those that are trying to distribute content and want to distribute it on someone else’s bandwidth dime.

My position is related to the last mile. P2P is so incredibly inefficient. You send and receive the same bytes , which means for the portion of the file you are a seed for, you are at least 50pct inefficient. The more often you supply the bytes on your PC to others, the more you impose on the network. If there is a failure somewhere in the chain of delivery and assembly on the destination device , the error recovery process makes things far less efficient. All consuming more and more last mile bandwidth. The bandwidth that defines how fast my internet connection is.

So I take it all back. DONT block P2P traffic. Just charge for upstream bandwidth usage like cellphone companies charge for minutes. That way if P2P really is more efficient, it will be a non issue. More people will use P2P and will never have to worry about their upstream bandwidth charges.

Mr Cuban, who made his fortune distributing content in a way that strained available bandwidth in its day is now dead set against peer to peer. So much LEGITIMATE media is now distributed that way and the amount is GROWING. The streaming content providers that compete more closely with broadcast pay a boatload of cash to content delivery networks to insure a good user experience. P2P requires the user to invest the own bandwidth they are paying for to get content delivered to them. Plus, any ISP is free to publish terms of service stating that they will limit or block P2P, and that will be the end of it. I think that is what is really annoying Mr. Cuban, since he has so much invested in the old content delivery methods is that he in danger of becoming irrelevant.
From internet content delivery pioneer to spoiled shameless old media twit. While it suited him, he wanted the net free for all uses, and since he made his megabucks, his tune has changed. Now he’s dancing with the stars, and totally clueless. Mark, what the hell happened to you?