One question that has been repeatedly raised in regards the the Comcast-BitTorrent affair is why wasn’t Comcast more open about what it was doing? Comcast’s response — supported by Richard Bennett in our recent podcast — is that more transparency would make it too easy to bypass the system. They say this is a cat-and-mouse game with bandwidth hogs (to mix zoological metaphors), and announcing what techniques are being used would simply give away the game.
That got me thinking. Since the Associated Press broke the story last week, the proverbial feline is pretty clearly out of the bag. Is word spreading on a bypass? A quick search on Google, with the phrase “how to bypass Comcast” indicates the answer is a resounding “yes,” with no less than 34,700 results. I’m not a technical expert, so I can’t say the bypasses work (and I freely admit I didn’t read all 34,700), but that’s still a lot of mice.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean Comcast was right to keep its practices so hush-hush. Even if Comcast wasn’t under legal duties to reveal more, more transparency would certainly have precluded much of this week’s consumer outrage. Still, if the Google results are any gauge, the cat-and-mouse game does seem very real.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.