The 2007 report Packet Forgery By ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair by the Electronic Frontier Foundation talks about the practices of Comcast (the second largest Internet Service Provider in the United States) to control and differentially prioritize the flow of information through their network. This “interference”, as the EFF calls it, consisted mostly of Comcast crafting specialized TCP/IP network packets to disrupt the connections of users using peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent and Gnutella. In the report, EFF describes the technical details of the methodology adopted by Comcast, explains its immediate and potential negative effects, counters the official argument/explanation put forward by Comcast, and finally, provides some possible countermeasures to defeat the mechanism being used.
When Downing tries to define Radical Media in his book Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, he points out that oppositional culture often intertwines with mass and popular culture (Chapter 1). In case of the Comcast report, EFF acknowledges that the Associated Press (which can be definitely categorized as a mass media organization) had a large role to play in bringing this issue to the larger public attention with their own, investigative report. However, a cynic may also point out that this might be more about AP being worried about the potential possibility of Comcast controlling the flow of AP produced content, rather than being an instance where mass media appropriates an oppositional point of view.
In terms of the audience, I would argue that EFF expects at least some of the audience to try to take on a more active role, and occasionally go as far as to be the producer of the data behind future versions of the report. The rationale for this argument is the fact that the web page for the report includes a link to a list of various ISP testing software, which can be downloaded by the readers to test and understand the traffic interference done by their own ISPs. Downing defines the audience as often being the joint producer of cultural production, and tools and initiatives like Glassnost and Google/New America Measurement Labs empower the readership of the EFF report to take up such roles.
In its website, the EFF describes itself as the “leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.” According to the threefold classification of social movements in Chapter 3 of Downing’s book, this description would definitely classify the EFF in category 3 – the “new social movements”. There is no calculated (and immediate) material outcome of defending one’s rights in the digital world, though I must admit that I find the use of the term “material” a bit vague. Is the right to equal access to digital resources online “material” ? There is also a strong collective identity for the readership who would identify with EFF’s mission, and ultimately with the report being discussed here – the identity being of “netizens” or “digital natives” (though I should point out here that I have reservations against using both of those terms).
In chapter 2 of the book, Downing tries to explore the spectrum of forces radical media tries to counter. In the EFF report, the actions of Comcast (the “Power”) can be seen as the initial steps of becoming an instrument of cultural hegemony. In the section titled “What Is So Bad About Comcast’s Actions?”, the report points out that Comcast’s conduct undermines the empowering end-to-end principle of the Internet, that enables anyone from any part of the world to establish a network connection with anyone else in the world. The report also hints at possible anticompetitive behavior of Comcast, since it is effectively the middleman between content producers and consumers and controls which producer gets priority. As a countermeasure, the report suggests collective steps and actions by the “user class”, and by the “software developer class”, where the former could try to use alternative protocols en masse, and the latter could implement support for encrypted protocols in their software, making it impossible for Comcast to detect the contents of the network packets flowing through its network. Of course, both approaches can be inconvenient and difficult, but as the report points out, even partially implementing these measures can force ISPs like Comcast to adopt more neutral, and benevolent methods of optimizing traffic flow (which, they argue, their primary motivation for trying to throttle P2P traffic).