All Things Digital

Comcast is apparently too busy drafting its “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to bother attending the daylong hearing into its dubious “network management” practices. An odd decision for a company so intent on “clarifying” the practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks. But according to a company spokesperson, Comcast (CMCSA) “felt the issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing, and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”

Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?

It’s quite a road-to-Damascus conversion Comcast (CMCSA) is having these days, isn’t it?

Back in February the cable company claimed it was perfectly reasonable for it to throttle or degrade the performance of peer-to-peer file-sharing services on its broadband network. But when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin suggested the agency was mulling action against it, Comcast had a moment of clarity. In March, it said it would work with BitTorrent to develop P2P-friendly network capacity-management techniques. And today it announced plans for an industry-wide effort to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

The document–which is to be created with the help of other Internet service providers, P2P companies and content providers–would specify how ISPs should manage P2P applications running on their networks and how consumers should use them. Said Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s Chief Technology Officer, “By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content.”

And by announcing its plans to create this framework right before the FCC hearing on its P2P-throttling techniques to be held at Stanford (in Palo Alto, Calif.) Thursday, Comcast is hoping the agency won’t take action against it for violating its Net neutrality rules.

It’s a Comcastic day for BitTorrent. This morning the cable provider, under fire for degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service on its broadband network, announced plans to develop better ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic. To that end, Comcast (CMCSA) will work with BitTorrent to develop a network capacity-management technique that is protocol agnostic.

Said Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, “This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, nondiscriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”

Of course you do. You just didn’t realize it until FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pointed it out, right?

Anyway, like most such corporately altruistic pledges, this one has the potential to do more good than bad–or more bad than good. “… We must recognize that these are two commercial entities whose goals are, in the end, to make sure that their networks and technologies are as profitable as possible,” writes Public Knowledge’s Jef Pearlman. “One can conceive of a world where an ISP and an application developer band together to make a proprietary system in which sanctioned application data gets preferred treatment, the ISP gets greater control of the application running on your computer, and both companies are happy in the exact situation we want to prevent. Time will tell what this partnership actually means.”

Turns out Benjamin Disraeli was wrong. There are four, not three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Motion Picture Association of America piracy figures.

The MPAA this week admitted that a 2005 study that blamed a significant portion of the film industry’s domestic losses on college movie pirates was erroneous. Touted as “the most accurate and detailed assessment of the film industry’s worldwide losses to piracy,” the study (PDF), described piracy as “the biggest threat to the U.S. motion picture industry” and attributed an astonishing 44% of MPAA company losses in the U.S. to college students.

Hollywood was quick to seize on that statistic and used it as the foundation of a campaign against file-sharing on college networks that would ultimately result in the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act, the demonization of the “Top 25 Piracy Schools” and the Higher Education Reform Act, which ties federal higher-education funding to efforts to combat piracy.

Trouble is, that 44% figure was a gross overstatement. In fact, the MPAA now says, just 15% of the movie industry’s domestic losses can be attributed to campus piracy. How did it happen that the study nearly tripled that figure? “Human error,” says the MPAA.

Ah. Well that explains it, then. Makes you wonder about all those other sky-is-falling piracy studies we’ve been bombarded with over the years though, doesn’t it?

“If the reports are true that the new, corrected numbers are way below the initial and highly publicized earlier numbers, then the MPAA owes an apology to the campus community,” Kenneth Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, told Inside Higher Ed. “The corrected MPAA numbers clearly confirm what many of us have said for a very long time: that P2P piracy is primarily a consumer broadband issue, not primarily a campus network issue, and that colleges and universities are more concerned and far more engaged in efforts to stem illegal P2P activity than are consumer broadband providers.”

Add to the steadily growing list of threats to national security one more: peer-to-peer networks.

At a hearing yesterday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) declared P2P networks a “national security threat,” claiming they’d caused federal employees to accidentally share sensitive or classified documents. “We used the most popular P2P program, LimeWire, and ran a series of basic searches,” Waxman said, referring to a bit of research done by his staff. “What we found was astonishing: personal bank records and tax forms, attorney-client communications, the corporate strategies of Fortune 500 companies, confidential corporate accounting documents, internal documents from political campaigns, government emergency-response plans and even military-operation orders. … It is truly chilling to think of what private information an organized operation or a foreign government could acquire with additional resources.”

Certainly is. But not nearly as chilling as the idea of government employees installing P2P software on government-issued computers holding classified government documents. No wonder the government got a C- on its 2006 Federal Computer Security Report Card.
The FBI is losing laptops like baby teeth, the Transportation Security Administration is misplacing hard drives with the Social Security numbers and bank account information of its employees, and now federal employees are jeopardizing the security of government emergency-response plans and military-operation orders by messing around with P2P clients.

Don’t try telling that to committee members like Rep. Jim Cooper (D., Tenn.), though. During yesterday’s hearing, he drew and quartered the lone representative from a peer-to-peer software company in attendance: LimeWire Chairman Mark Gorton. After suggesting that Gorton’s own home computer was likely leaking sensitive documents, Cooper lambasted him as “one of the most naive chairmen and CEOs” he’d ever encountered. “I’d feel more than a shade of guilt at this point, having made the laptop a dangerous weapon against the security of the United States,” Cooper said. “Mr. Gorton, you seem to lack imagination about how your product can be deliberately misused by evildoers against this country.”

Evildoers, huh. Is that a euphemism for federal employees doing government work on computers connected to peer-to-peer networks?