BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

Sohn may have an ally in FCC chairman Kevin Martin. At the Consumer Electronics Expo in Vegas this month, Martin promised a full and speedy investigation into ISP blocking, saying such blocking of apps like BitTorrent is one of the FCC's top priorities for 2008.

Not everyone is thrilled about the FCC getting involved. The EFF, BitTorrent, Comcast, and industry experts cringe at regulation, or, God forbid, some lobbyist-smudged bill from Congress.

"We're of two minds on this," EFF attorney von Lohmann says. "While we agree with the principles of Net neutrality, we're deeply riven about how to proceed. The idea of the government regulating the Internet gives some people pause. We are not nearly so sanguine about it."

Some Net scientists say any new regulations would be based largely on guesswork. According to Josh Polterock at the UC San Diego Supercomputer Center, much of the Net's infrastructure is in private hands. These companies guard their specifications lest they give up competitive advantages, trade secrets, or security risks. The public doesn't "even have an idea of what the Internet is, let alone how or where to take its pulse and set bandwidth guidelines," he says.

According to some researchers, what little testable evidence we have predicts traffic gridlock on the Net by 2010. Without infrastructure improvements, experts say the Net could look more and more like Bay Area car traffic — bumper to bumper at its peak, with unexplainable pockets of congestion around the clock.

BitTorrent's creator thinks the government should be adding more high-capacity fiber-optic lines to ease traffic. "We need to see the Net for what it is — a public utility," Bram Cohen says. "If you're going to dig the road up anyway, you might as well lay a conduit this size [he makes a fist] and put in enough fiber for the next hundred years. Then you'd just need an 'Office of Divvying It Out,' whose only real mission is to make sure no one hogs this unsaturatable resource."

Cohen says that while Comcast filtering hurts his business model, he sees an opportunity to work with ISPs in a friendly way so BitTorrent doesn't swamp Net traffic. His engineers intend to make the company's software more bandwidth-conscious this year.

Cohen is even a Comcast customer at his home in Marin. His biggest gripe with the service? The DVR sucks compared to TiVo. It's clunky, slow, and it crashes: "The quality of the DVR exemplifies the problem with the whole product," he laughs.