PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) — Comcast Corp., an Internet service provider under investigation for hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers, announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.
Since user reports of interference with file-sharing traffic were confirmed by an Associated Press investigation in October, Comcast has been vigorously defending its practices, most recently at a hearing of the Federal Communications Commission in February.
Consumer and “Net Neutrality” advocates have been equally vigorous in their attacks on the company, saying that by secretly blocking some connections between file-sharing computers, Comcast made itself a judge and gatekeeper for the Internet.
They also accused Comcast of stifling delivery of Internet video, an emerging competitor to the cable company’s core business.
Comcast has said that its practices were necessary to keep file-sharing traffic from overwhelming local cable lines, where neighbors share capacity with one another. On Thursday, Comcast said that by the end of the year, it will move to a system that manages capacity without favoring one type of traffic over another.
The company initially veiled its traffic-management system in secrecy, saying openness would allow users to circumvent it. But on Thursday, Werner said the company would “publish” the new technique and take into account feedback from the Internet community.
Comcast has been hampering the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, which together with the eDonkey protocol, accounts for about a third of all Internet traffic, according to figures from Arbor Networks. The vast majority of that is illegal sharing of copyright-protected files, but file-sharing is also emerging as a low-cost way of distributing legal content — in particular, video.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing “has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution,” Werner said. “So we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”
Comcast now says it is in talks with BitTorrent Inc., the company founded by the creator of the protocol, to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet. The companies said they want to work out these issues privately, without the need for government intervention.
FCC commissioners have indicated that they take the issue seriously, and commission Chairman Kevin Martin has voiced objections to secret traffic management. More…
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