Comcast Censors Customer Downloads

comcastcesnsorship Comcast is now apparently a censor of its customers.  It started out as a rumor among several of its customers.  Then concerted effort were made to attempt to determine if Comcast was actually censoring its customers.  As it turns out, it appears that they are.  They are not selectively censoring content, they are censoring bandwidth.

In particular they are censoring bandwidth as it is used with BitTorrent.  BitTorrent provides a peer-to-peer downloading service, and is popular these days with people that like to download movies or TV shows.  If the legality of these downloads is sometimes in question as the ownership of the content is dubious at best.

Regardless, it is unusual for an Internet service provider to censor its customers.  The test utilized to determine is Comcast was actually doing this activity, utilized a version of the King James Bible which is in the public domain and it's legal to download.  People rely on their Internet service providers to deliver them information.  In many ways this is similar to the reliance of people have on the postal service to deliver their mail.  The censorship by Comcast would be similar to the postmaster preventing some mail from making it into people's mailboxes based on the source of mail.

Receive a letter from the Vatican and you might get banned, receive a letter from Falwell University and it might be okay.  Regardless of who sends it to the post office would subjectively ban it in this analogy.  That is what Comcast seems to be doing with information that comes from BitTorrent, the service that they are slowing down.  They don't entirely blocked the information, they just slow down the download, which serves to put a speed bump on the bandwidth and frustrate people you're trying to get information off the Internet.

1 Responses:

Windyridge said...

Wonderful, who will do this next.

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