The fat lot of nothing done about Comcast’s alleged-but-shiftily denied P2P blockage has been kicked over by a hot plate of lawsuit action. Filed by Comcast customer John Hart in the most consumer-friendly state around, it hits them for “breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and violating the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act.” That’s all legal speak for “Comcast is a lying liar and they suck a lot for misrepresenting their services.”
Comcast maintains it only “delays” traffic and is “not blocking anything,” swearing stuff will get to where it’s going eventually—traffic shaping, which a lot of ISPs do. But according to the AP and EFF, they’re actually forging packets telling both ends of a connection the other side doesn’t want to play, killing it like innocent children on a playground.
Hart’s seeking class-action status for the suit, disclosure of traffic shaping—or blockage, as it were—in ads and a ban on blocking applications. All reasonable, though if goes class action and prevails, it won’t probably won’t look so reasonable to Comcast’s coffers. [Ars Technica, Flickr]
The fact that Comcast was caught by the AP blocking BitTorrent last week wasn’t much of a surprise (even if it was a disappointment), but more people have done self-tests and discovered they’re possibly blocking even more application traffic. The EFF found that not just Gnutella—another file sharing app—was being blocked, but Lotus Notes, an app businesses use to share calendars, emails and files over the net had its traffic interfered with as well. It’s fine to piss off a bunch of file sharers, but when Comcast starts making sure that a CTO can’t get the files off his work machine, that’s a different story altogether. Net Neutrality, we need you! [EFF via Ars Technica]
