•Comcast's actions violated the FCC's policy that "consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." In independent tests by myself, the Associated Press, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), we demonstrated that if a unique file was available on certain peer-to-peer (P2P) network nodes located on Comcast's network, that Comcast users could not transfer the content. It was completely blocked. If the file was not unique to Comcast nodes, then Comcast's users could only freely access the content only from the non-Comcast sources.

•Comcast's actions violated the FCC's policy that "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice." I presented reproducible test cases and results that showed that Comcast was applying an Application-Layer (Layer-7) Deep Packet Inspection device to change the way that the application normally operates. In effect, Comcast was not allowing the application to run as it was designed to run; it secretly hid a device inside their network that changed the normal operations of the applications that I chose.

•Comcast's actions violated the FCC's policy that "consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network." Devices like the Vudu and Myka rely on the BitTorrent protocol in order to work, and both devices are certainly used to access legal content.

•Comcast's actions violated the FCC's policy that "consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers." Comcast was discriminating against several targeted peer-to-peer networks. The Associated Press reported that attempts to transfer the Bible over the P2P BitTorrent network were blocked, and Richard Bennett still demonstrates that attempts to transfer the Bible over a client-server architecture of a Web site are always successful. This proved that users do not enjoy the benefits of fair competition between P2P applications (such as BitTorrent, Vuze's Azureus, uTorrent, Gnutella, eMule, or Shareaza) and client applications (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera).

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell missed that point when he wrote in The Washington Post on July 27 that the better way to handle the Comcast issue was by collaboration over regulation. McDowell wrote: “If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions.” Here’s the rub. There is a mechanism for such collaboration. There is an Internet Engineering Task Force, made up of those who understand the inner working of the Internet best. As one of those Net luminaries, David Reed, testified to the FCC at the Cambridge hearing, what Comcast did was outside the bounds of acceptable practice. Collaboration broke down. Privately, some industry executives express nothing but disdain for the IETF, saying that the organization is simply a bunch of engineers with unenforceable standards.

This is where McDowell, in the same op-ed article, got it right: “If they (collaborative groups) can’t reach an agreement – which has never happened – then government could examine the situation and act accordingly.” This was just such a case. Despite the attention paid to Comcast, and the less attention paid to Cox, which is using the same techniques, neither company has stopped doing what it was doing – disrupting the traffic of Internet users for the most spurious of reasons. There have been a series of announcements form Comcast about how the company will work with this company or that to “solve” the problem, but a few words about talking of a potential agreement some day won’t cut it.

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