I posted about Comcast the number two ISP in the U.S., using traffic shaping to slow and block BitTorrent users. More reports are coming in that methods Comcast are using are also affecting Gnutella and Lotus Notes users.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation joins the Associated Press, as well as several others in confirming Comcast’s traffic shaping practices using forged TCP packets with the RST (reset) flag set. This is a dangerous precedent that truly shows that Net Neutrality is in trouble. It is one thing to “manage your network” as Comcast suggests and purely another thing to target certain types of users and protocols.

Comcast is filtering the port 1352 traffic, according to Kevin Kanarski, who is actively working with IBM/Lotus and now has proof that Comcast traffic shaping is affecting Lotus Notes. This affects many employees who work in large companies that use Lotus Notes and need to get their email and attachments at home.

Comcast from what I have read denies that they are doing this. But have been caught with tests run by several sources. I guess this a lot like when they denied they were slowing competitors VoIP services.

According to tests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating. “Comcast keeps telling its users that the problems they’re seeing are not its fault. It’s time for Comcast to come clean about what it’s doing and take its users’ reports seriously.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation:
When an ISP starts arbitrarily zapping some of the protocols that its customers use, they instantly endanger the cascade of innovation that the Internet has enabled. Before this kind of traffic jamming, anybody — huge businesses, small start-ups, college students and children in their bedrooms — could build new, innovative protocols on top of the Internet’s TCP/IP platform.

If this type of conduct is allowed to continue, many innovators will have to get active assistance from an ISP in order to have their protocols allowed through the ISP’s web of spoofing and forgery. Technologies like BitTorrent and Joost, which are used to distribute licensed movies and are in direct competition with Comcast’s cable TV services, will be at Comcast’s mercy.

It is time for some Comcast customers to step up and complain loudly and drop them for another ISP. Problem is some subscribers have NO CHOICE. Is it that the large ISPs like Comcast feel their lobbying machine have already sufficiently killed Net Neutrality? If consumers do not put a stop to this the Internet will soon be a very different place. One controlled by a few large companies that can stifle competition easily and the result will be the death to innovation on the Internet. At least in the U.S.

See: How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling

UPDATE: Comcast seems to be playing with words as it denies “blocking” content or “favoring” any content over its network. While also claiming confirmed its bandwidth management technologies may slow a peer-to-peer service as part of a technique known in the industry as bandwidth shaping, which is the targeted constraining of delivery pipes. This could delay the delivery of a file but not block it.

Wow, that is “COMCASTIC!” They just sloooow the traffic they don’t like and want to be revived for NOT blocking it entirely. I feel for the Comcast users that lack choice and either suck it up and accept these shenanigans or go back to dial up!

Again I ask, do you think we need Net Neutrality laws, since we lack the choice of providers? Do you think that the Comcastic ISP would do this stuff, if consumers had choice?

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