throttling
Comcast to Pay $16 million for BitTorrent Throttling
Comcast, the ISP that gained a bad rap when last year it was accused a number of times of interfering with the traffic of p2p users and pledged good behavior in January 2009, settled its class-action lawsuit yesterday. The company agreed to pay $16 million (minus $3 million in fees) damage compensation to those customers who had their bandwidth throttled. Comcast’s statement came shortly after: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement in these consolidated class action lawsuits.
Continue reading »Comcast settles P2P throttling class-action for $16 million
Comcast has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the throttling of P2P connections that had users up in arms in late 2007 and 2008. The company still stands behind its controversial methods for “managing” network traffic, but claims that it wants to “avoid a potentially lengthy and distracting legal dispute that would serve no useful purpose.” It was more than two years ago when Comcast subscribers began finding evidence that the broadband provider was blocking packets—particularly those being sent through BitTorrent. When the complaints mounted, the Associated Press went ahead with its own investigation and came to the same conclusion: downloads through BitTorrent were either being blocked altogether or being slowed down significantly.
Continue reading »Better Throttling than Disconnecting, Says Musician
In the light of the latest events linked to p2p regulations, such as Lord Mandelson’s announcement for implementing disconnection plans and EU’s scheduled amendment for the current legislation which we reported earlier today , file sharers could still benefit from a discarded “three strikes” piracy model. One of the artists opposing such a model has always been Radiohead’s guitarist Ed O'Brien, who while not supporting UK government's decision to enforce the cutting-off plans, believes that something must be done to stop online piracy and he sees bandwidth throttling as a good solution. Here are some good points why “three strikes” legislation is, ultimately an aberration.
Continue reading »Traffic throttling wars: 800 file with CRTC
CAIP and J.F. Mezei of Vaxination have made submissions to the CRTC more or less stating it erred in the original “throttling case” that’s allowed Bell Canada to continue throttling its customers, wholesale competition included. As I write this, the CRTC has put up filings in support of CAIP and Vaxination from hundreds of people and from Distributel (a telecommunications wholesaler), the Campaign for Democratic Media via CIPPIC, Union des Consommateurs, and the Canadian Film and Television Production Association.
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