Now that the courts have ruled against the FCC in its ruling against Comcast, many people are rehashing the misunderstandings that got us into this mess in the first place.  While the discussion about the FCC’s jurisdiction and where it’s headed after the ruling is important, it is useful to have some context and debunk those myths regarding the Vuze complaint against Comcast which started it all.

Comcast’s actions were not anti-competitive to Vuze

One of the more persistent myths regarding this case is that Comcast’s motives were anti-competitive against Vuze, a video distribution company that utilizes the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol.  The theory asserts that Comcast wanted to severely impede access to Vuze’s video distribution network because Comcast has its own competing video service.  But Comcast never impeded Vuze’s service by pruning the number of BitTorrent seeder connections (dedicated BitTorrent uploaders who have already finished downloading) with TCP resets.  That’s because Vuze has their own dedicated seeds which they call “pre-seeding” to ensure that their BitTorrents are always healthy.

Vuze never had a real complaint against Comcast other than the fact that Comcast might have limited the amount of dedicated seeding bandwidth its customers could contribute to Vuze’s distribution network.  Yet the new “Fair Share” system from Comcast that was approved by the FCC effectively limits BitTorrent bandwidth even more because the new system targets the heaviest broadband subscribers rather than any specific protocol.  Comcast’s new system keeps the heaviest users from starving other customers which means BitTorrent downloaders and uploaders have to be occasionally throttled in addition to BitTorrent seeders.  Vuze’s complaint about Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling essentially forced Comcast to throttle Vuze even more so that the system more equitably allocates bandwidth between broadband subscribers.  While these actions on the part of Vuze seemed odd, they were a relatively unknown company that became widely known over night after all the publicity and their opportunity to show off their technology before the FCC and media.

TCP resets are not packet forgery and they are commonly used

The other common myth is that the use of TCP resets are some type of abhorrent packet forgery.  The IETF representative at the FCC Comcast hearings in Stanford (which I was also an expert witness at) was asked point blank by the FCC if TCP resets were in violation of the Internet standards and the representative refused to characterize it that way.  The reality is that TCP resets are a very standard mechanism used by all commercial routers in every broadband home as well as business grade network equipment.  ITIF Research Fellow and network protocol architect Richard Bennett explained that:

“TCP resets are the standard mechanism used by consumer routers to deal with NAT table overflow, which itself is typically caused by excessive P2P connections”

It is also a fact that TCP resets aren’t packet forgeries.  It is the only way that a router can specify (not spoof) the connections that should be closed.  End points using the network frequently discard TCP connections without properly closing them and these orphaned connections can build up and flood the memory resources of routers and firewalls if they aren’t cleaned up.  The cleanest way to clean these orphaned connections is for the router to tell the end points explicitly that the connection is closed.

Adverse effects existed but they were grossly exaggerated

The old system used by Comcast certainly had imperfections that needed to be corrected, but they were grossly exaggerated.  Reports proclaiming widespread indiscriminate BitTorrent interference from Comcast were actually the result of poorly crafted testing.  The claim that Comcast was censoring Christianity were contrived because it isn’t practical to use BitTorrent to distribute copies of the King James Bible in the first place.  You can download a copy from a Comcast customer ten times faster with any old web browser because Comcast provides 1 gigabyte of web server storage.

The main problem with Comcast’s old system was that it might overly affect “rare torrents” which are unpopular BitTorrent files that depend on a few dedicated seeders, but even that problem had an excellent workaround.  But regardless of how few customers were affected, fixing the problem with a better network management solution is simply good business with or without an FCC mandate.

Comcast won’t go back to TCP resets even if they won in court

Comcast never implemented TCP resets for the malicious and anti-competitive reasons attributed to them because the system was designed to alleviate network congestion and improve every customer’s experience including BitTorrent users.  Comcast stopped the use of TCP resets before the end of 2008 as did Cox and StarHub which were two ISPs that never received much media criticism or mandates from the FCC to stop.  Sandvine which produced the TCP reset product used by Comcast had also updated their products to use less controversial and more precise methods by the end of 2008.  So aside from avoiding public and congressional backlash, there is simply no reason for Comcast to go back to the old system even if the court ruled in their favor.

Did it have to be an ugly legal battle?

The FCC never fined Comcast to begin with and there was no need to find Comcast guilty of bad behavior when Comcast wasn’t trying to behave badly in the first place.  The misguided cries of packet forgery and anti-competitiveness didn’t help because it backed Comcast into a corner without a graceful exit.  Not helping was the fact that Comcast’s handling of media inquiries and the FCC hearings at Harvard were incredibly misguided and contributed to much of the distrust against them.  But with all the bad media attention and controversy surrounding TCP resets, the FCC might have pushed Comcast towards a more enlightened approach without an embarrassing conviction and claimed credit for being the calm fact-based mediator.  It’s too late for that now so the next step is to sort out the jurisdiction mess which is a subject for another day.