More deceptions from Free Press about Comcast “blocking”
The whole Comcast issue is being kicked around in the press in recent days because the Max Planck Institute released a study showing the rates of TCP resets happening throughout the world. But this whole issue is being mischaracterized as the “blocking” of BitTorrent and it’s being portrayed as a free speech issue when it is nothing of a sort.
Richard Bennett explained why this shouldn’t be considered blocking and Andrew Orlowski wrote a pretty good editorial raising the concern that this is trivializing real free speech violations. One thing in Orlowski editorial that really caught my eye was the continual misrepresentation of the facts by people like Ben Scott of the Free Press.
Ben Scott said: “I would disagree with your characterization of RST packets. This is in fact blocking by definition. It think your analogy is inapt. It would be the equivalent of traffic stops sending me back home to start driving to work all over again.”
Ben Scott explained to Orlowski that his portrayal of the facts are backed up by “experts” so I have to wonder who these experts are? Jon Peha? Peha demonstrated at Stanford and in his FCC filing that he doesn’t even understand the multi-stream principle or the auto-restart feature in P2P applications like BitTorrent. Even when every TCP stream (often up to 40 streams) of a P2P download are being continuously reset and a full blockage is in place, you never start all over again. Jon Peha and Ben Scott would have you believe that BitTorrent forces the user to manually resume like a phone call that’s been disrupted and that BitTorrent has to restart a file transfer from scratch. While I and others like Richard Bennett have pointed this out to the FCC and directly to Jon Peha, these deceptions continue to be propagated.
Then there are other “experts” like Software Tester Rob Topolski and some unnamed professors that Free Press lawyer Melvin Ammori likes to cite. They claim that BitTorrent can “only” use 4 upstream TCP flows per Torrent which on the face of it is laughable because 4 is a soft limit that can easily be exceeded. The bigger problem with this claim is that uploads aren’t the issue since uploads continue on indefinitely and uploads aren’t the endgame. What should be looked at are the number of completed file transfers which is the real endgame and the number of upload streams an individual P2P seeder can offer is irrelevant. The uploaders are merely contributing to a pool of available P2P servers so what matters to the completion of file transfers is the time it takes to download a file.
If Jon Peha, Rob Topolski, and Ben Scott are actually correct in their description of Comcast’s Sandvine system, then a good case can be made that what Comcast is doing is not reasonable network management. But the arguments they make are easily proven wrong and BitTorrent corporation or any P2P software company would take offense at the claim that their product is incapable of automatic resume and incapable of resuming where they stopped.
A traffic light does “block” cars at stop signs for a short duration and even longer at stop lights. But when that stop light is broken and it defaults to a stop sign, overall traffic begins to flow much slower. If we take the stop sign out and let people go whenever they feel like it and there’s a collision, then cars gets ensnared in a severe traffic jam. This is precisely what happens when you have no reasonable network management and you get less effective throughput so applications (including P2P) are actually sped up by reasonable network management.
It’s true that Comcast’s management scheme has some problems because it harms rare torrents that are unhealthy to begin, but there are workarounds for these problems and the problems are overblown. I even showed how you can force Comcast to seed you 100 times faster without consuming your own upstream or your neighbor’s upstream. So while it’s reasonable to argue that Comcast’s P2P management system is far from ideal and needs improvement (which Comcast promises to do by the end of this year), it’s flagrant deception to portrait this as application blocking and it’s ridiculous to turn this in to a free speech debate.