There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle on ARS Tech­nica about Comcast’s FCC filing regard­ing its prac­tices of secretly fil­ter­ing net­work traf­fic. For those of you not up on the latest news, the FCC has been inves­ti­gat­ing Comcast’s net­work man­age­ment prac­tices after Vuze objected to Comcast’s prac­tices of degrad­ing P2P connections.

The arti­cle gives a really nice expla­na­tion of what is actu­ally going on. It’s also some good read­ing for people who don’t know how Com­cast actu­ally struc­tures its net­work (ie. what your neigh­bors are doing makes a big dif­fer­ence on your net­work speed).

The basic prob­lem here is that Com­cast over­sells its net­work on the premise that nobody will use all of it. When a few cus­tomers actu­ally attempt to use all of the band­width, the whole thing chokes. So instead of actu­ally upgrad­ing its net­work, Com­cast fil­ters out the traf­fic using lots of band­width (read P2P traffic).

While over­selling is noth­ing new, what Com­cast does strikes me detri­men­tal to every­one. The main prob­lem is that when the inter­net became pop­u­lar, net­works were designed for mostly down­load­ing con­tent. Most people were con­sumers, a few were providers. Todays inter­net, is dif­fer­ent. P2P net­works are more preva­lent. YouTube is huge. The dynamic has shifted. More people are now providers, and more impor­tantly, this trend will con­tinue. Even­tu­ally, inter­net providers will have to restruc­ture their net­works to account for this change. Fil­ter­ing con­tent is only a stopgap.

I don’t nec­es­sar­ily dis­agree with the idea that Com­cast should limit the amount of band­width that indi­vid­u­als can use. But if this is to be the rule, there needs to be a lot more trans­parency in the matter. Con­sumers need to be informed of what is the band­width cap for each ser­vice plan is. There also needs to be an easily acces­si­ble method for con­sumers to track their band­width usage. Most impor­tantly, Com­cast should notify con­sumers when they are fil­ter­ing their pack­ets, instead of just send­ing TCP reset packets.

If con­sumers have the actual infor­ma­tion to make informed deci­sions, the market will decide whether or not this strat­egy is okay. This is of course, assum­ing that con­sumers do actu­ally have alter­na­tive providers and that the ISP market is actu­ally a fair market. Yeah right. Score one for cor­po­rate wel­fare.

Update: Upon fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, I’d like to clar­ify my point about it being okay for Com­cast (or anyone) to filter inter­net con­tent. What I actu­ally meant, was that I think it is okay for an ISP to filter or lessen high-​volume traf­fic from indi­vid­ual sources, pro­vided that there is suf­fi­cient trans­parency in the matter. ISP’s cer­tainly need to start sell­ing what they can actu­ally pro­vide, but they also should be able to keep some users from adversely affect­ing others.

I do not under any cir­cum­stances sup­port the fil­ter­ing of traf­fic based on con­tent. This is not the job or role that ISPs should be in the busi­ness of playing.