With both sides in the net neutrality debate predicting catastrophic consequences if their opponents prevail, any real world evidence of what a non-neutral net might be like can help. So I have to wonder if a recent gripe from a Comcast cable modem customer, plus a story I read in this morning's newspaper about Comcast blacklisting The Well, might be providing a sneak preview of what one of the biggest players has in store for us all.
A reader who is a Comcast broadband customer had a disturbing experience recently. "I'm at a total loss about how to handle this situation," the reader wrote. "An e-mail to me from a friend got bounced apparently by Comcast. He resent it to my G-Mail account so I could see it. It said that his message was "Blocked for abuse. Please send blacklist removal requests to blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com' among other stuff. So apparently there exists a Comcast blacklist that I cannot control that stops e-mails and that requires my correspondents to ask to be permitted to send me messages."
Since the reader's friend, who was using a Juno dial-up account, wasn't particularly interested in dealing with Comcast's mysterious blacklist operation, the reader tried to get some more information himself. "Comcast customer service tells me that I can contact their Customer Security Assurance department, but the phone number I was given is a continuous message loop with no option to either leave a message or speak to a person," the reader wrote. The reader's messages to Comcast's "EcareOnline" were answered with explanations of how to find the header information from the blocked message that Comcast would need to clear the blacklist. "How can I look at the header of the bounced message if the message was bounced and never got to my inbox? How do I know if Comcast is demanding that others who are trying to message me also get their permission first?"
Before the reader could figure out how to get anyone at Comcast to pay attention to the problem, the blacklist on his friend's messages disappeared as arbitrarily as it had materialized in the first place. But that hardly leaves the reader feeling sanguine about the experience. Why was that particular message blocked? What is Comcast's blacklist based on? If Comcast wants to blacklist known spam sources, why can't it use one of the public blacklists like Spamhaus rather than this totally non-transparent procedure?
A little Googling quickly reveals that the reader and his friend aren't the only ones bitten by the Comcast blacklist. Adding to the absurdity of it all is this morning's story about Comcast blocking all messages from The Well, one of the original online communities. If you know anything about The Well, you know that its highly unlikely that its diehard loyalists are spamming Comcast users. And if you know anything about Comcast, you know that if Well users actually did decide to spam them, Comcast wouldn't have a clue where it was coming from.
Yes, there's no question that all of this is far more easily explained by the remarkable incompetence Comcast has long displayed (see Comcast Seems Clueless About Blacklists) in the e-mail arena than some malevolent plot. This is a company that has never been able to properly support its own broadband customers, much less innocent third parties impacted by its random actions. But that's just the point. Is there any reason to believe that non net-neutrality would make Comcast any better at handling such issues? Or is it far more likely that their blacklist messages will one day include the helpful hint that a small token payment to Comcast is what's required to speed the sender's message on its way? In that sense, Comcast's blacklist ineptitude might stand as the best real-world evidence right now of what disaster the end of net neutrality could spell for us all.
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9:10:39 PM 
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