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Comcast Throttles Uploads

October 27, 2007 on 9:05 am | In IdBlog, Spin | Add a Comment

This morning NPR’s On The Media had a fascinating piece about Comcast and net neutrality. In a podcast titled “Please Don’t Share” OTM interviews an AP reporter who found that Comcast was blocking uploads from customers using file-sharing software like BitTorrent. In one instance, the upload of a version of the Bible was blocked , or “delayed” over a file-sharing network. Apparently the ISP, which is also the country’s largest cable TV provider, attempted to disguise its interference with a proxy.

Certainly file sharing uses a lot of bandwidth, but network providers should not have the ability to selectively throttle some content. This principle was codified in the common carriage rules that governed emerging telephone networks in the early 20th century and it is at the core of the Network Neutrality debate today.

Common carriage is an old concept from English common law. It held that the free flow of goods over a common network — like shipping lines or stage coach lines — was of such a high economic and public value that it should be protected by law. Columbia Business School professor Eli Noam wrote a prescient paper on this topic in 1994 called Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage, which made a strong case for the economic benefits of maintaining common carriage principles in information networks.

But this is not just an economic issue. It is a question of free speech. If Comcast can deny or delay information traveling over its network based on file size or mode of transfer, what’s to prevent it from throttling content it disagrees with? Does a network provider like AT&T or Verizon have the right to block content from a source it deems distasteful? What happens to the public debate if a few corporations control the transmission of information?

This is why Congress needs to act now. We need legislation this year that guarantees Network Neutrality.

For more on the history of telecom, see The Fundamentals of Telecommunications on the University of Massachusetts’ servers.