It's not like those times you find yourself watching Anthony Bourdain on the travel channel and think "oh, just one more episode," and then suddenly it's two days later. It's more like those times you're trying to share that sweet new Kanye track and you can't. Yeah.
Comcast, the second largest internet company in the country, has been caught totally blocking certain web traffics. Like, well, high-speed subscribers sharing files. What does that spell? Data discrimination, dude. Which totally runs up against ideas of net neutrality. Dude.
The discreet blocking is one of the most gnarly examples of data discrimination by a U.S. internet provider to date, even involving company computers pretending to be users. AND if these tactics were used by all U.S. internet providers, it would totally kill file-sharing networks. Like that.
Comcast's file-sharing blocks are part of a pretty lame way of controlling bandwidth, and it comes in the form of blocking uploads, not downloads. But if nobody is uploading anything, then there's nothing to download, right? Right.
So heres the process:
- go to upload something
- another "user" (a.k.a. Comcast company computer) sends a message to stop communications
- upload stops.
- ta-da!
This could be seen as simply "traffic shaping," which is common, but what Comcast is doing involves overt trickery, only effects one type of traffic (file-sharing), and actually stops uploads, instead of just slowing them down. It's also completely random, so it could in fact be stopping legal OR illegal files. My assessment? Bullshit!
