Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Blocking – UPDATED

A California man filed suit in state court Tuesday against internet service provider Comcast, arguing that the company’s secret use of technology to limit peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent violates federal computer fraud laws, their user contracts and anti-fraudulent advertising statutes.Plaintiff Jon Hart, represented by the Lexington Law Group, argues that Comcast’s promises of providing internet connections that let users “Download at Crazy Fast Speeds” are false and misleading since Comcast limits downloads by transmitting “unauthorized hidden messages to the computers of customers” who use peer-to-peer file sharing software. Hart wants the court to force Comcast to stop interfering with the traffic.

He also wants the court to certify the suit as a class action and force Comcast to pay damages to himself and all other Comcast internet subscribers in California

The suit (.pdf), which also claims the BitTorrent blocking is an unfair business practice, was filed in California Superior Court in Alameda County.

Defendants have disseminated and continues to disseminate advertising, that they know or should reasonably know is false and misleading. This conduct includes, but is not limited to, promoting and advertising the fast speeds that apply to the Service without limitation, when, in fact, Defendants severely limit the speed of the Service for certain applications.

It further includes Defendant’s misrepresentations that their customers will enjoy “unfettered access” to all internet applications, when, in fact, Defendants not only fetter certain applications, but completely block them. Defendants know or reasonably should know that this advertising is false and misleading.

In the suit, Hart says he upgraded to Comcast’s Performance Plus service in September specifically to use the “blocked applications,” and that nothing in the 22-page terms of agreement with Comcast indicated that the company throttles traffic.

Though Comcast has yet to see the suit, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas pointed THREAT LEVEL to the company’s FAQs about its traffic shaping and issued the following statement

Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online.

We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage our network so that they can continue to enjoy these applications.

Comcast refuses to plainly explain what it does to control BitTorrent traffic, but independent analyses have shown that Comcast is severely throttling internet traffic that is using the popular file sharing protocol BitTorrent by sending fake “I’m finished” messages to users’ BitTorrent programs. Those fake packets are also alleged to affect users of the mainstream business application Lotus Notes. The lawsuit charges those fake packets violate the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The BitTorrent protocol is used for sharing large files — from pirated films to open-source OSs — by having downloaders also serve as uploaders, even when they have only downloaded a portion of the file. Though almost nothing is publicly known about aggregate internet traffic, BitTorrent protocol traffic is often estimated to constitute 35% to 40% of internet traffic.

ISP discrimination against certain kinds of traffic also violates established Federal Communications Commission policies on Net Neutrality, the suit argues.

Comcast has yet to be served with the suit, according to Lexington Law Group attorney Mark Todzo. The firm is waiting to get an official copy of the suit back from the court and expects to serve Comcast later this week.

Comcast will then have 30 days to answer the complaint or seek dismissal of the suit.

The case is Hart v. Comcast.

UPDATE: Comcast was working on an answer to THREAT LEVEL’s questions when the story was posted, and their response was added as soon as the company got back to us.

Comcast Using Malicious Hacker Technique Against Own Customers, New Report Says

One of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies is using a controversial technique to cripple certain kinds of Internet traffic traveling across its networks, says a new report from the digital rigthts  group the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

“Comcast is essentially deploying against their own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers (this is doubtless how Comcast would characterize other parties that forged traffic to make it appear that it came from Comcast or its subscribers,)” write the authors of the new report. “In other words, Comcast is essentially behaving like a telephone  operator that interrupts a phone conversation, impersonating the voice of one party to tell the other that this call is over, I’m hanging up.”

The nine-page investigation was conducted by  EFF staff technologists Peter Eckersley, Seth Schoen and  senior  intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann.

The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol  used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online.

Comcast has said that it doesn’t block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.

When asked about the new report, spokesman Charlie Douglas said that the company had no comment. And he directed Wired News to a past statement issued by the company that said that the company merely delays certain kinds of peer-to-peer traffic at peak congested times, rather than blocking it.

But the investigators’ report says that it is Comcast’s approach to managing the traffic that is most problematic.

The authors say that Comcast is forging Internet traffic and injecting it into its customers’ file-sharing applications’ stream of traffic to choke their transmissions.

The effect for the end user is that they may end up thinking that it is the software that they’re using that’s failing, note the report’s authors.

Comcast does tell customers that it retains the right to manage the traffic to make sure that  everything runs smoothly.

But the EFF’s investigators note that Comcast’s approach is discriminatory because it targets only certain kinds of applications  –  in this case, file-sharing applications.  This kind of targeting undermines a fundamental ethos that has so far driven the success of innovators on the Internet — an open system that requires no permission from anyone to experiment online, they say.

“Comcast’s recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly,” write the authors. “By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet.”

The report may have far-reaching consequences since it presents detailed evidence of an ISP actively interfering  with its customers’ traffic in an apparently arbitrary fashion.

The report says, for example, that its tests showed “no evidence that Comcast was targeting their jamming efforts at customers based on their individual consumption of bandwidth,” and that there are  more above-board ways of managing their traffic.

Various parties may use the report to boost their cases both against Comcast, and to push forward new rules to ensure that telecommunications companies do not discriminate online.

Both the Bush administration and telecom companies have argued that there isn’t any evidence of discriminatory actions to justify such rules.

Lawmakers have re-introduced legislation on the subject this year in the Senate, and a House bill sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey is expected to be dropped before the end of the year. In addition, a complaint against Comcast over the issue has been lodged at the FCC, and a California consumer has launched a lawsuit against the cable company in the wake of the AP story.

“Certainly the FCC ought to thoroughly investigate this, and based on that investigation take the appropriate steps,” said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition. “It also argues for ex ante rules that prevents this from happening in the first place.”

“In some ways, the EFF’s paper raises an additional set of questions — they only looked at Comcast — what about the other ISPs, … what other communications are being blocked and dropped?” he asked.

Comcast has 12.4 million high-speed Internet subscribers.