IP Democracy: Memo to Comcast: Non-Answers Foster Paranoia

The New York Times' Brad Stone has this bit about how Comcast is responding to the allegations that it blocks P2P uploading on its high-speed Internet service. Stone believes, and I agree, that the Comcast PR people are "genuinely baffled" about the accusations that Comcast uses Sandvine's technology to thwart users from uploading videos using BitTorrent. (In my earlier post I suggested that Comcast truly doesn't know why there are problems using BitTorrent.)

But Stone's conversation with a non-PR Comcast executive was not all that enlightening either. Comcast still insists that it doesn't block P2P uploads, but merely slows them down sometimes, which is probably true -- most ISPs do this as a routine matter. My sense is that Comcast really believes what it says. There is no "secret agenda to shut down file-sharing applications."

Yet...that still doesn't answer why in fact the uploads are being blocked, as evidenced by the AP's unsuccessful attempts to upload the Bible using BitTorrent using multiple Comcast connections. In the absence of a clear explanation, a lot of folks are going to get paranoid about what Comcast is really up to and start hunting around for gunmen on the grassy knoll. That would not be good for Comcast because conspiracy theories live on forever and prompt endless scrutiny, and not of the good kind.

As Stone writes:

The problem Comcast may now be facing is that in the absence of a plain explanation about what the company does to disadvantage certain applications in the name of managing traffic on its network, anecdotal reports and conspiracy theories fill the vacuum.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 23, 2007 12:00 AM to IP Democracy