FCC Says No To Comcast Port Blocking

As you know, I'm not one of those bloggers who looks for news stories, writes a couple lines about it and then gives you a link to the original story. I don't have anything against those types of blogs. It's just that there is more than enough of them. Once in a while I will pass on a news story to you, if I feel it's important enough. Recently there has been a couple and this is one of them.

If you haven't followed this story, here is what has been going on. When you use your computer on the internet, it communicates through ports. The ports are like channels that are used for certain types of data. For example port 21 is used for ftp, port 80 is used for websites, and it goes on and on. There are certain ports that are typically used for p2p or file sharing traffic and torrents. One could argue that torrents and p2p programs are used for illegally sharing software, music and movies. While this may have been true in the beginning, it is no longer the case. Many people and companies are using p2p and torrents for legal file transfers. There's lots of linux distributions, video blogs, and even the BBC is using it for legal distribution of media.

Apparently, Comcast decided that they would cut down their traffic by blocking ports that are commonly used by p2p and torrents. Comcast also realized that their customers would be pretty upset when they found out that they were paying $60+ a month and didn't have access to the entire internet. So what did Comcast do in the wake of tens to hundreds of thousands of irate customers calling them to find out why they all the sudden couldn't use p2p or torrents? They did what any honest company would do, they lied. Comcast told customers that they weren't doing it. If you called Comcast to find out what the problem is, they denied it had anything to do with them. When a company the size of Comcast tries to lie to the public about something like this, it isn't long before people working for said company come forward and let the cat out of the bag. Which is exactly what happened. This got the FCC interested.

After Comcast got caught trying to deceive it's customers the FCC started looking into it. So when a public hearing was held at Harvard, Comcast payed people off the street to fill seats. This way, when people who actually cared about what was going down, came to the hearing, they couldn't get in because the seats were already filled.

Today, the head of the Federal Communications Commission announced that Comcast, who is the largest Cable company in the nation, violated federal guidelines when it blocked and degraded Web traffic. This is a real victory to consumers. Finally, the FCC is standing up for the consumers and not just big business.

For more details here's a couple different links.
Wired

PCMag

GigaOm