Study: Cox, Comcast Internet subscribers blocked

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer, Technology / Telecom

(AP) -- Cox Communications appears to be interfering with file-sharing by its Internet subscribers in the same manner that has landed Comcast Corp. in hot water with regulators, according to research obtained by The Associated Press.

Content from The Associated Press expires 15 days after original publication date. For more information about The Associated Press, please visit www.ap.org .

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Posted by gopher65 05/15/08 11:17

Rank: 5/5 after 1 vote

If this were a measure against illegal file sharing I'd shrug my shoulders. But I use bittorrent for legal activities! For now they're just blocking P2P, but how long will it be before they decided that services like Amazon unbox are taking up too much bandwidth? How long before high quality videocasts are placed on the blacklist too? Those are just as bad as P2P for taking up massive amounts of bandwidth, and more and more vidcasts are appearing every day. Actually they are worse in local areas because of the centralized nature of the direct-from-server distribution model. At least with P2P the load is spread out all over the place.

This is nothing more than a shady attempt by certain ISPs to milk their customers for money while not providing the promised services. And all because they are too lazy and too cheap to actively invest in their infrastructure.