Comcast Invests in P2P

AHTuttle writes to mention Comcast, recently under fire for throttling P2P traffic, has decided to invest in a P2P video-delivery startup called GridNetworks. "Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are 'friendly' to Internet service providers."

Neutrality, schmeutrality

peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are "friendly" to Internet service providers.

"Friendly" meaning, of course, that the customer pays the ISP extra for it.

Re:Neutrality, schmeutrality

Well, yes, there's probably that, immediate upfront scratch is not to be ignored...

but I worried about the idea that they'll try to force subscribers to load their P2P software on any/all machines that want to connnect, even if you don't WANT to use ANY P2P. This is just pure paranoia on my part of course, unless I'm right.

Why not "legally" turn ALL their customers into "bots" via the seducing promise of better video sharing on "their" P2P network. I'm just saying...

Re:Neutrality, schmeutrality

but I worried about the idea that they'll try to force subscribers to load their P2P software on any/all machines that want to connnect, even if you don't WANT to use ANY P2P. This is just pure paranoia on my part of course, unless I'm right.

Even with all the corruption in ISPs, I doubt that it will be passed. Because the effort of monitoring it and the effort of making a cross-platform P2P application would take tons of effort if they want at least some business as it would have to be ported to Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows CE, The Xbox, The Xbox 360, iPhone OS, Mac OS X, Earlier versions of Mac prior to OS X, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PS3, PS2, Gamecube, Linux (all distros), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, other versions of *BSD, UNIX, Solaris, various cell phone/PDA OSes, other Internet appliances, and all this software has to be not just maintained for older versions, but new versions yet to come out. So no, I don't think this will happen for a long while...

Re:

Nope, they'd force everyone to use XP or later, and leave everyone else out in the cold.

Is anyone really surprised?

It's the age-old philosophy of "understand or destroy." Once they realize something can make or save them huge bucks, they'll no longer demonize it. Or at least not their own brand of it...

Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...

Now that Concast are trying to show the federal government - not the customers - that they are good, I _still_ have issues with BitTorrent! It still takes over 30 minutes to get a consistent speed greater than 100kbps on a so-called High Speed network! So I will NEVER buy anything that comes out of this service because of what Concast did (completly forbid me from using BT for over 2 years)

First post w00t! :)

Re:

Are you sure you're just not downloading torrents with poor seeding?
Have you tried any of the better, private trackers?
Are your ports properly forwarded?
Is your client configured correctly?

Etc, etc, there are so many things that you could be doing wro

Re:Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...

When you have Comcast or Cox Cable, it is a good bet to blame the ISP first.

Re:Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...

When you have Comcast or Cox Cable, it is a good bet to blame the ISP first.

That's true, but don't fall into the trap of thinking it must be so.
We recently moved to a VOIP system at my work, and we have a lot of employees who work from home. Some of them are having problems. They can make a call, it connects, but no audio. One of my first thoughts was, "Stupid ISPs blocking traffic to sell their voice service". Our tech from the company we bought the system from took a phone that worked fine connecting to our office from their office to his house where he has Comcast and it failed the same way, lending another data point on that side.
I took my phone home today, plugged it in and it works fine and I'm also on Comcast in the same area.
My boss did the same and we had a nice clear conversation.
So I can't blame Comcast on that one. I'd like to blame my users (obvious next step), but as of right now, I think it's probably just an issue with certain brands of home firewall/routers. Of course, if more than two
users had even responded to our request for issues, I might have more data upon which to base my opinion.

So, while it's good to keep in mind that they're sleazy operators and *will* lie about it, other things still fuck up ;-)

Re:Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...

still takes over 30 minutes to get a consistent speed greater than 100kbps on a so-called High Speed network!

Slow down there, champ. The BitTorrent protocol uses an approximate tit-for-tat strategy -- more peers will upload to you if you upload to more peers. This can take a while, which is why BT speeds generally trend up slowly, although I'll admit 30 minutes is a bit much even in my experience (I used to have comcast, now have at&t -- they're both crap, in short). It's all explained in this very clear and easy to read paper by Bram Cohen (the original protocol author) : Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent [www.sics.se] (PDF link).

Re:

*nodding* using a tool that was posted here on Slashdot recently I tested for Comcast BitTorrent tampering over the weekend. It came back and said that every single way it could run a test BitTorrent transfer, it was being tampered with by Comcast.

That baby will be born dead.

An ISP will be stuck carrying traffic for whatever systems are deployed. It can't deploy one of its own and try to force people to use it (at least not without coming under fire on antitrust grounds).

And the commercial product will not become widely adopted and displace the other P2P applications. To do that it would have to be about 10 times as good an application and there isn't that much headroom available. (As for slowing down the other P2P applications, see above.)

Finally, it won't even be able to compete equally on a level playing field because it will certainly be hobbled with DRM.

Don't they understand

Don't they understand that they could cut their P2P traffic down to 0 by just providing the MP3s and MPGs for free on one of their own servers?

Sheesh!

ISP Friendly Means...

What do you think, does "ISP-friendly P2P" mean implementing local swarming algorithms and the like, or some sort of net-neutrality-breaking official P2P?

It'll be like their DVR offerings.

I don't care about time shifting when they play the shows over and over. I care about skipping commercials. Commercial skip is often disabled with these provided DVRs, so I won't use them.

I'm sure some content will be disallowed on their P-2-P systems, s

Perhaps we should give Comcast a break

Aren't they just trying to speed up their internet for the average user, and bitTorrent just happens to be the biggest bandwitdh hog?

Do they really care if you're downloading newestLinuxDistro.iso or newestDVDrelease? I wouldn't think so.

On the other

Re:Perhaps we should give Comcast a break

Aren't they just trying to speed up their internet for the average user

      No, they're not. How does using method A vs method B change the amount of megabytes of data that user X wants to download? It's irrelevant, unless you can prove to me that their "method" uses less "overhead" (the amount of stuff in each packet that isn't actual data). But downloading 400MB via bittorrent, limewire, Kermit or a binary dump is still going to amount to a 400MB download.

      However you may have a bright future in either marketing or politics.

What it _can_ do for comcast.

What this sort of thing _can_ do for comcast (etc) is keep the bandwidth usage from crossing one of their (toll road) borders.

Back when "the internet was monitized" and companies started charging for everything by "actual us" as opposed to "bandwidth promi

Antitrust

This screams antitrust and conflict of interest. It screams it from every cell phone tower and internet backbone.

No, we don't have a problem with P2P...as long as you're using ours. Yeah, I know, people will always find a way around it as long as there's a network somehow connecting two computers, but that's not the point.

Re:

It doesn't even come close to screaming antitrust. Now, if Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc. all banded together and backed a single P2P solution while throttling any others, that would merit antitrust action.

What this screams is desperation. Comcast r

Legal is key

FTFA - it looks like they are focusing on the "legal" downloads and rentals aspect of the application. If I had to guess, they might be heading in the "hey, we provide a legal alternative to BitTorrent, so what's all the fuss" as they drop torrent packets or turn off that traffic all together.

How exactly does one download a rental from a peer?

Re:

BitTorrent isn't illegal though. It would be like saying HTTP is illegal because I can download ROMs, MP3s, Cr@ck3D Warez just the same as via P2P. P2P just happens to be able to download things very, very, very efferently, so therefore people *gasp* downl

Re:Legal is key

That's nice - now explain to Joe WarcraftPlayer why he has to endure a forced wait just to get patches. Or explain why in the hell it takes someone 3x as long to grab Fedora Core 9 via BT than it would by grabbing it directly from an overloaded mirror server.

Therein lies the clue you appear to be missing - not all BT traffic is illegal. Bittorrent has shown itself to be one hell of a sweet distribution channel during times when new releases of legit content and applications come out, which takes bandwidth pressure off of mirror servers.

Also, all questions of legality and illegality aside, I honestly don't see any improvements in bandwidth that come from Comcast's forging of RST packets. If anything, it would only increase the amount of crap traffic and excess traffic (mostly caused by peer reconnects, re-establishment of connections lost, seeking new available connections, etc)...

You'll find few if any people in here that have anything against buying legit software. The objections come from two places:

1) Comcast is perfoming 'man-in-the-middle' attacks on their own customers, regardless of whether that attack may be justified (pirated material) or not (legit material). Conceptually, if they can do that, then what's to stop them from pretending to be you in any other context? It's a violation of many things, including existing anti-hacking laws.

2) What right does Comcast have to interfere with legitimate traffic?

I already know the argument - it's their network, take it or leave it... great: so let's strip the artificial monopolies they've been granted by state and local government, and remove any special privileges that they've been enjoying from said governments. Until they are willing to give those up, then they should and must be subject to us, the customer base.

/P

Seriously? I am impressed.

I gotta say, this is impressive.

A corporation which has a fiat monopoly in many places (granted by local governments) has been using their monopoly to degrade one company's service. A practice for which they are already under investigation by congress. And now they are investing in that company's competition.

I gotta say that again, because I can barely believe it.

A company which has government granted monopolies in many communities has been degrading a company's service. They have come under congressional scrutiny for this behavior. And, while still under investigation, they are investing in a competing company.

The chutzpah is truly impressive. I haven't seen a pair like that in a very long time.

How completely pathetic is our monopoly abuse enforcement that a company would actually try this? would think this is a low-risk move?

P2P Threatens ISP Middleman Content Monopoly

Comcast wants a slow hobbled P2P network because P2P ultimately threatens their fat juicy monopoly cable television content delivery monopoly. I don't believe it's oversold bandwidth for one second. Those fiber optic cables are just proportioned 90% cable television crap channels, 10% internet (if not 95/5%). The profit margin on internet is probably ten times greater than the profit margin on cable channels, but losing the cable channels monopoly probably represent a threat to 66% of their revenue. It's all about controlling the delivery of electronic bits.

If bandwidth were to start growing like CPU power grew, every cable television company will be competing against every cable television company in every city market for content delivery. That means eventually a la carte cable television channels. Why is it that allegedly oversold bandwidth doesn't have the slightest effect on the delivery of cable television content?

It looks like Comcast wants to move in on P2P so they can try to dominate it, eventually infest it with commercials, and control it so that it doesn't threaten their content delivery business. Right now almost every Comcast cable television customer is paying for a whole bunch of commercial infested crap they don't really want. Who has time to watch all 200 channels of crap being sent through fiber optic cable 24/7? Comcast could increase internet bandwidth a *hundred fold* if customers could start choosing to knock out the total waste of bandwidth caused by delivery of content nobody wants to watch, including HD bandwidth hogging versions of content nobody wants to watch.

It's imperative for Comcast's long term business survival that they become a P2P middleman, or they are screwed. Since they can't shut down P2P without politically unfeasible anti-trust violations (threatening every web site, every VoIP business, everything on the internet), they are going to try and grab a hold of P2P and use their dominance to try and shape P2P. You damn kids consumers trying to skim the skim, trying to middleman the middleman.

This is Comcast 2.0, as in become the 2 between the Ps.