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Providers Struggle With Demands Of Net Video

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By PETER SVENSSON, The Associated Press

Published: February 18, 2008

NEW YORK - In 1995, the first warning was raised: The throngs of people swarming to the Internet would overwhelm the system in 1996. For more than a decade, that fear has proved untrue.

Until right about now. The growing popularity of video on the Net has driven a traffic increase that's putting strains on service providers, particularly cable companies. To deal with it, they have had to change the way they convey Internet data.

And they've done this in secret, raising concerns - by Web companies, consumer groups and the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission - that the nature of the Internet is being altered in ways that are difficult to divine.

But as traffic grows, there are signs that these subtle and secret controls are insufficient and will give way to more overt measures. For instance, we could find ourselves paying not just for the speed of our connection, but also for how much we download. Already, some ISPs are hindering file-sharing traffic, and AT&T Inc. is talking about blocking pirated content.

The issue is coming to a head this year, as the FCC is investigating complaints from consumer groups and legal scholars that Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable ISP, secretly hampered file sharing by its subscribers. File sharing, which allows Internet users to download movies, music and software among one another, has been a haven for piracy, though legal uses are proliferating as well.

By interfering with traffic, the groups said, Comcast is determining what will and won't work, violating the Internet's unwritten tradition of "net neutrality" - the principle that traffic be treated equally.

The FCC has adopted a broad policy that Internet service providers can't block specific applications. But its interpretation of that statement is not clear because it hasn't had to rule on a similar case.

The FCC case will be closely watched by ISPs because it appears that most of them use some kind of traffic management, slowing down less time-sensitive traffic, such as file sharing, to keep Web surfing snappy.

"The increasing use of bandwidth by a minority is an increasingly important issue for all ISPs," said Time Warner Cable Inc. spokesman Alex Dudley.

Time Warner Cable reserves the right to limit the bandwidth available to such applications as file sharing and manage traffic in other ways. But it won't say what it does, for fear that competitors could attack that in their marketing.

Internet service providers and consumer advocates agree that some form of network management, also called "traffic shaping," can be good for everybody. The goal for ISPs is to ensure that "some bandwidth hog can't knock your mom off, who's just trying to get her e-mail," said Rob Malan, founder of Arbor Networks, a Lexington, Mass., company that supplies the gear ISPs use to identify and prioritize traffic.

When users complained to Comcast about file sharing not working, the company would not acknowledge the problem. Only after an Associated Press investigation brought attention to the issue in October did Comcast disclose it was temporarily blocking some file-sharing attempts. It updated its online Terms of Service on Jan. 25, without telling customers, to include a statement about how it may limit file sharing.

It's difficult to have a public discussion without knowing the facts, so Lauren Weinstein of the nonprofit People for Internet Responsibility has formed a Network Neutrality Squad to figure out what is actually happening on the Internet.

"It's an open society, and frankly, I don't buy into the premise that you have to have these secret rules ... to protect these networks," Weinstein said.

His squad is developing software tools that it will distribute for free to people who want to test what their ISP is doing, then collect the data.

Comcast has also drawn fire for imposing secret limits on how much its subscribers can download in a month, then cutting off subscribers who don't heed warnings. Its rationale is that it doesn't want to scare the vast majority of its customers, who get nowhere close to the limits. Other ISPs are also reported to have secret limits.

Breaking the code of silence, Time Warner Cable announced Jan. 16 that it would explicitly cap the monthly downloads available to new customers in Beaumont, Texas, as a test. Subscribers who go over their allotment will pay extra.

Public Knowledge, one of the consumer advocacy groups that complained about Comcast's practices, welcomed Time Warner Cable's test as an example of a move toward openness and a good alternative to aggressive traffic prioritization.

Meanwhile, Internet "power users" howled in outrage and fear that their Internet bills would go up. It's likely, however, that explicit download caps are something U.S. households will have to get used to.

The most surprising tack on traffic management comes from AT&T. Even though ISPs aren't liable when their subscribers share copyright materials, it is considering examining Internet traffic to stop piracy.

If AT&T does implement such a filter, it would cross another important line for an ISP: looking at the content its customers transmit. While some ISPs reserve the right to examine the content, the only publicly acknowledged use of that technology is to fulfill a wiretap order.

AT&T's filter would be akin to opening letters to make sure they contain no photocopies of books.

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