Comcast: We Won't Terminate Your Account Under Six Strikes; We'll Just Block Every Single Website

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Mar. 01, 2013

The various ways in which the big ISPs would implement their version of the "six strikes" Copyright Alert System had mostly been leaked over the past few months, but there had been nothing coming out of Comcast. AT&T planned to block "frequently visited websites" after the fourth strike. Verizon planned to throttle speeds so low that it would drive users crazy. It looks like Comcast is doing something similar to Time Warner, which means that after four accusations (not convictions, not proof of guilt, just accusations), anyone using the account of someone who hits that strike will have all of their browsing hijacked and sent to a landing page that they cannot get around. Oddly, for reasons that don't make much sense, the page that TorrentFreak links to on Comcast's site disappeared. If I go to it, I get a 404 not found. But if I do a search on the keyword "mitigation," it still shows up in the index. Then I click, and the page is still gone. Either way, while it's technically true that they're not "cutting off" people, they are clearly cutting them off from the wider web.

"If a consumer fails to respond to several Copyright Alerts, Comcast will place a persistent alert in any web browser under that account until the account holder contacts Comcast's Customer Security Assurance professionals to discuss and help resolve the matter,"

No information is given on what it means to "resolve the matter." It's hardly a surprise that Comcast would choose the most extreme option, considering that it owns NBC Universal, whose execs supposedly drove much of the discussion around the CAS system. In the meantime, are we still supposed to believe, as per the cheery video that the Center for Copyright Information put out, that this is all for the benefit of ISP users?