Comcast Blocks Torrent Seeding

Comcast, one of the US’s largest providers of high-speed Internet, has decided to crack down on the use of BitTorrent on their networks.

Now, ISPs throttling back the connection of users who engage in heavy BT traffic is, of course, nothing new; it’s been going on for a few years in any case. But Comcast is taking it a few steps further. According to this report, Comcast is actually preventing its users from seeding BT files at all. (It still appears to work while the torrent is stil actively downloading from the server, but once the DL is finished and your client switches into seeding mode, that’s when it’ll be blocked.) Standard workarounds will avail you naught; it’s being blocked at the source, and frankly there’s very little you can do about it (legally, at any rate).

Of course, this does not take into account the fact BT has legitimate, non-infringement uses as well; the rapid distribution of free (in the “beer” and “speech” senses) software, such as various flavors of GNU/Linux, comes most readily to mind. There are even lots of non-copyrighted old movies you can legally download and enjoy via BT and other means.  Naturally, Comcast is not making any distinction between “legal” and “illegal” when it comes to BT use… in fact, if anything their goal seems to be to block as much P2P traffic as possible, for reasons of reclaiming bandwidth more than preventing distribution of copyrighted material. (Comcast is hardly alone in this; most ISPs tend to frown upon P2P traffic for this reason as well, even if the MPAA and RIAA weren’t factors.)

…At least, that’s what Comcast says. In reality, who really knows? Of course, BT is probably one of the most popular avenues for the illegal distribution of movies, video games, and large music collections, so you can bet that factor played a role in Comcast’s decision to indiscriminately block all BT traffic. (I don’t want to say anything here that could get us sued, but there have been instances in the past where groups such as the MPAA have put pressure on ISPs and content providers to take a more active role in blocking P2P and filesharing, lest they be sued themselves… it wouldn’t take much of a leap of logic to suggest something similar has happened here. If, indeed, there is more to Comcast’s decision than simply what they’re telling the public, which we just don’t know right now.)

Undoubtedly, a full solution will be forthcoming eventually… at least, we hope. Until then, if you’re a Comcast customer and have been having trouble seeding torrents lately, let us know. We’re curious to know how complete the rollout of this throttling software truly is at this stage.

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