BitTorrent president: Comcast agreement is a 'win'
BitTorrent president and co-founder Ashwin Navin talks up the Comcast detente, even though BitTorrent will still be filtered on a 'protocol-agnostic' basis.
(Credit: Anne Broache/News.com)HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--Public pronouncements of the thaw in Comcast-BitTorrent relations continued on Thursday, with BitTorrent's president calling their newly hatched agreement a "win" for anyone who develops bandwidth-intensive applications.
Earlier on Thursday, the companies announced plans to forge a "collaborative effort" in which the cable operator would devise a method to manage its traffic on a "protocol agnostic" basis, while the file-sharing application firm would work on making the process of transferring large files work more smoothly on that network.
The agreement doesn't mean that Comcast will stop doing traffic management deemed necessary to keep its pipes unclogged at peak congestion hours, but BitTorrent President and co-founder Ashwin Navin said he's OK with that.
"Internet service providers will need the ability to shape the traffic in order to provide service," Navin told CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh during an onstage discussion at a technology policy conference here. "The win here for BitTorrent and for all peer-to-peer applications is that we will not be treated differently from other forms of Internet traffic."
The pact between the two companies arrives as the Federal Communications Commission investigates whether Comcast's admitted disruption of file-sharing uploads was a "reasonable" episode of network management or something more sinister.
Navin said he feels good about BitTorrent's relationship with Comcast, but he didn't rule out the possibility of the FCC decreeing more specific rules by which all Internet service providers should abide.
"The FCC still has other ISPs in this country it obviously needs to be vigilant over," he said, although he didn't name any specific companies.
But right now, the 55-member company based in San Francisco has no plans to develop a presence in the nation's capital, and views its role in affecting policy-making as limited.
"We're not going to be the ones who hire lobbyists, we'll leave that to the ones at Google and Microsoft," Navin said.
On copyright
Shortly after the Comcast-BitTorrent news broke, a seemingly unlikely suspect released a press release praising the deal: the Motion Picture Association of America.
MPAA President Dan Glickman called the agreement "exactly the kind of industry cooperation that is urgently needed to address the problem of online piracy," even though the joint BitTorrent-Comcast press release made no mention of copyright infringement matters.
Navin, for his part, said he wasn't "quite sure" where the MPAA got that impression. He did, however, say that he received a call from the organization Thursday morning, and it appears to be on board with "making sure whatever we do...does take into account the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and whatever interest the copyright holders have."
It would be completely possible for Internet service providers and copyright holders to collaborate and essentially "sit" on BitTorrent streams, looking for pirated content, although such a practice could raise privacy concerns, Navin acknowledged. He suggested rights holders could benefit from embracing content delivery methods like peer-to-peer file sharing, and BitTorrent has already struck scores of those deals itself.
"I'm actually a strong believer that in the future, the whole idea of digital piracy will be not nearly as pronounced as it is today," Navin said, "because we will have innovated business models and actually found ways to monetize free flow of video."
Comcast has consistently provided poor service, poor speed, and poor consistency over the past 6 years I have had it. In addition I learned that they began trafic shaping BitTorrent traffic -- making my internet connection even more useless. Comcast's infrastructure upgrades over the past 6 years have been less tha sufficient. My connection speed has decreased significantly since ~2001-2002 with the exception of gimmicky "PowerBoost" ie 30 seconds of decent speed followed by slowness. You dont need PowerBoost for something that finishes in 30 seconds anways.
To conclude the rant; maybe my connection will be faster than in 2001 again. And maybe it will actually be possible to download HD Movie Trailers at reasonable speeds again too.
"I learned that they began trafic shaping BitTorrent traffic ..."
Nope, con-cast hasn't been "traffic shaping" BitTorrent traffic.
They have been forcefully terminating it by forging TCP reset
packets, essentially "tricking" the protocol into terminating itself.
They have proceeded to lie about doing anything, then when it
was PROVEN they were doing this they have gone into "damage
control" mode and lied about what they WERE doing, calling it
"traffic shaping". They have sent letters to employees threatening
them with termination if they disclose this FACT to their
customers, all employees are expected (forced) to toe the
company line/lie.
I doubt your service will ever improve, they have created this
problem themselves by loading way to many people on their
hubs and not building the infrastructure they need to keep up
with the times. They're making money hand over fist off of you,
what have you seen to make you think that will change?
- by Php_Jesse August 19, 2008 5:21 AM PDT
- That guy looks a lot like George Lopez...
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