Data Discrimination - Instances of Data Discrimination

Instances of Data Discrimination

Worldwide, the BitTorrent application is widely given reduced bandwidth or even in some cases blocked entirely. Worldwide, under heavy attack from spam e-mail, many e-mail servers no longer accept connections except from white-listed hosts. While few care about the rights of spammers, this means that legitimate hosts not on the list are often blocked.

Save The Internet, an advocacy organization led by Free Press, is documenting situations in which ISPs have engaged in data disrimination.

• In 2004, a small North Carolina telecom company, Madison River Communications, blocked their DSL customers from using the Vonage VoIP service. Service was restored after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intervened and entered into a consent decree that had Madison River pay a fine of $15,000. In this case, the FCC investigated allegations that Madison River violated nondiscriminatory obligations contained in the Communications Act, but the redefinition of broadband as an information service dramatically reduces the authority of regulators to deter this kind of competitive misconduct.
• In 2005, Canadian telephone giant Telus blocked access to voices-for-change.ca, a website supporting the company's labour union during a labour dispute, as well as over 600 other websites, for about sixteen hours after pictures were posted on the website of employees crossing the picket line.
• In April 2006, Time Warner's AOL (America On Line) blocked all e-mails that mentioned www.dearaol.com, an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme. An AOL spokesman called the issue an unintentional glitch.
• In February 2006, some of Cox Cable's customers were unable to access Craigslist because of a confluence of a software bug in the Authentium personal firewall distributed by Cox Cable to improve customers' security and the way that Craigslist had their servers misconfigured. Save the Internet said this was an intentional act on the part of Cox Cable to protect classified ad services offered by its partners. The issue was resolved by correction of the software as well as a change in the network configuration used by Craig's List. Craig's List founder Craig Newmark stated that he believed the blocking was unintentional.
• In August 2007, Comcast was found to be preventing or at least severely delaying uploads on BitTorrent. These claims were verified in October by the EFF and Associated Press.
• In September 2007, Verizon Wireless prevented a pro-choice organization from sending text messages to its members coordinating a public demonstration, despite the fact that the intended recipients had explicitly signed up to receive such messages.
• On February 4, 2010, Verizon Wireless blocked 4chan, an English language imageboard from being accessed by its customers. A few days later, on February 7, 2010, Verizon Wireless confirmed that 4chan had been "explicitly blocked", offering no explanation. The block was lifted a few days later.
• In a March 2009 Freedom House report on Internet and digital media censorship world-wide, Egypt scored a 45 (out of 100), slightly worse than Turkey but better than Russia. Cuba scored a 90, making it more Net-censored than even Iran, China and Tunisia. Cellphone service is too expensive for most Cubans.
• Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally. The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users. Comcast's interference appears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers.
  • If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.