Intellectual Property Law

Comcast?s New Open Architecture Will Block Annoying Content

By Cynthia Brumfield

Offering further details on its broad-based collaboration with BitTorrent Inc. and other interested Internet parties, Comcast executives yesterday emphasized that the company?s pending ?protocol agnostic? capacity management technique would not specifically target P2P applications or any particular application. Instead, the new open framework proposed by the nation?s top cable company will reduce capacity strains on the network by blocking obtrusive ads, automatically streamed videos, pop-up pages and other annoying content, regardless of the application used to deliver the content.

?By throttling the transmission of these annoyances, we can reduce traffic loads on our local network by at least 30%,? Comcast CTO Tony Werner said, eliminating the need for any kind of P2P bandwidth management techniques. ?Our main goal is to provide a superior Internet experience for our customers,? Comcast President Steve Burke said. ?Our customers have told us that although they worry about any P2P filtering we might implement, they look forward to our help in weeding out content that just shouldn?t be on the Internet.?

Specifically targeted by Comcast?s new system will be the following annoyances:

1. Ads that incorporate sound, specifically those with the smiley face characters that say ?no way.?
2. Ads that move around the page, particularly those that block article text, and very particularly those ads that offer a "fake" close-out button.
3. Most Facebook ads.
4. Splogs that appear to be legitimate.
5. Video advertisements that begin streaming automatically.
6. Cute girl tech-oriented video bloggers.

While Comcast's customers may appreciate the new network management policy, consumer and public interest groups are not happy. Public Knowledge CEO Gigi Sohn said "Comcast has absolutely no right to predetermine what the public might find annoying. Most of the Internet is annoying. Does Comcast intend to block most of the Internet?"

Comcast's chief competitor, Verizon, took advantage of the disclosure to point out that due to the quite, quite massive amount of capacity on its vastly superior fiber-to-the-node networks, it has no need to manage its network at all. "Our networks are so superior to Comcast's systems that we're able to deliver all Internet content -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- all the time," EVP Tom Tauke said.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 01, 2008 (boomark / email).