BROOKE GLADSTONE: One way to sidestep the digital broadcast conversion headache is having or getting cable. Cable subscribers are not affected by the switcheroo. And, if you do get cable, there’s a good chance you'll be sending your monthly check to Comcast. It’s the cable monopoly in 40 of the top 50 markets. It’s also the third largest phone company in the U.S., and it’s the largest provider of broadband Internet to homes. With great power comes great visibility, and Comcast is excruciatingly visible. In late 2007, Comcast was caught blocking its own customers from filesharing. Specifically, it was stopping people from uploading content, whether a song, a movie or even text, onto peer-to-peer networks using applications like BitTorrent. This is just one of many things that has made Comcast so unpopular. In fact, in a couple of recent brand reputation and customer satisfaction surveys, Comcast’s rep hovered just above such corporate bogeymen as the war profiteering Halliburton and subprime mortgage lending Countrywide. A few years back, our own Bob Garfield created an online clearinghouse for customer complaints – that he no longer runs – which is why he’s not doing this interview. In this month’s Wired Magazine, senior writer Daniel Roth fleshes out the Comcast uploading scandal which began with a man named Robb Topolski.

DANIEL ROTH: Robb Topolski was an Intel engineer who was having a medical issue. He couldn't stay awake. He wasn't sure why. He was on medical disability. And he was at home and decided to play with some new technology. And one of the things he was really interested in learning about was filesharing. He’s very into barbershop harmony. [BROOKE LAUGHS] He wanted to [LAUGHING] share some of his songs from the Civil War era, and no one was biting on any of his music he was trying to upload. He figured, you know, this wasn't the most popular music, but still someone would want it. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Not a single person seemed to.

DANIEL ROTH: Not one person. No one in the entire world, [BROOKE LAUGHS] using filesharing. So he started investigating – he’s a software engineer, knows how to do this – and discovered, after months and months when he was awake and able to actually sit at his computer, that there was something wrong with his local Internet service provider, who happened to be Comcast.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Describe how they were blocking the filesharing.

DANIEL ROTH: If you think about this as a phone call, the way it would work if you were talking to a friend and suddenly your friend said, I have to go, I'm hanging up right now, and your friend at the same time heard you say, I'm hanging up, I have to go right now [BROOKE LAUGHS], but neither of you had ever said anything. It is purely a disguise. It’s the phone company getting on there and pretending to be you. That’s what Comcast was doing. They were sending packets along that pretended to be the other computer saying, please stop giving me this file, and the other computer would say, please stop taking my files. That lack of transparency cost them a lot in terms of their reputation and it caused them a lot of trouble.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about Comcast’s side here for a second. They say – and it’s true – that when people upload or download huge files, it slows the traffic on the Internet for everybody and that they were just managing that, making it more fair. And Brian Roberts, the head of Comcast, didn't understand why people were so angry at him.

DANIEL ROTH: Yeah. As he explained to me, he said, on Mother’s Day,AT&T has to manage its phone network because there are so many calls going on. It overloads the system. Every network manages itself. He just saw himself managing his network. I think one of the problems that Comcast got into – and this speaks to a lot about where Comcast is today – is they didn't realize the power of a small group of people on the Internet to cause an international incident. If you live in Louisville, Kentucky and you don't like your cable provider, your neighbors know that you’re complaining. On the Internet, everyone in the world knew that there was this problem with filesharing, and people in Sweden and in Japan were upset with Comcast for doing it. Comcast couldn't believe the uproar and the amount of anger that was being leveled against them, so they conducted some focus groups around the country and they found a) that their users barely had any idea what file sharing was – this was a small group of people;not everyone is using filesharing – and once they had it explained to them exactly what was going on and how filesharing can use up bandwidth for everyone, the focus groups tend to be on Comcast’s side.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: On the other hand, the network neutrality types, the people who believe that the Internet needs to be a level playing field for all of its users, were concerned that there was active discrimination going on against those who used BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer filesharing services. Yes it’s true, they slow the traffic for everybody. On the other hand, if you start discriminating against them, where does it end?

DANIEL ROTH: Exactly. This is very much a slippery slope argument, and the people who are defending the Internet end users’ rights have used this as a way to say, if we let Comcast do this, what’s next? Will they block certain websites? Will they give preference to their own video over the Internet, rather than YouTube videos over the Internet? You know, these are all things that could come if we allow Comcast to slow down filesharing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, anyway, the clamor over this whole deal got so loud that the FCC issued a 67-page report.

DANIEL ROTH: Yeah, the FCC basically said Comcast was lying to us, they were lying to users, they were discriminating against traffic and possibly they were doing this because they wanted to protect their own video properties, which is exactly what some of the people who really saw Comcast as being an evil company were saying. It was surprising to see this in an FCC report. And they said - you've got to stop.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what did Brian Roberts of Comcast say?

DANIEL ROTH: Brian took two paths at the same time. Number one, he said he was going to stop, and he started to embrace openness a little bit. And they put together a proposal explaining exactly how they managed their network, what kind of technology they're using, and they said, from now on, we're going to put a cap in place. You cannot download over 250 gigabytes a month of data over our network. And 250 gigabytes is a lot of data.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What does that mean in user terms?

DANIEL ROTH: Well, if you wanted to download 125 movies in standard definition, you could. If you were really into YouTube, you could watch 1,750 hours of YouTube a month and not hit the cap.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay.

DANIEL ROTH: So it’s a very generous cap.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You say in your piece that, quote, “In the end, the geeks won, but they may have unwittingly hurt their own cause.”

DANIEL ROTH: This cap is an interesting thing. The cap basically stops discrimination. You can download data any way you want and get to the 250-gigabyte-a-month cap. But once you have the biggest player in the country saying a cap is okay, it’s much easier for every other cable company and DSL provider to also say a cap is fine, and they're not going to go to 250. It’s going to be much, much lower, or it’s going to be tiered. You’re going to pay a certain amount for a certain amount of bandwidth and you’re going to have to be thinking about what you’re downloading and what you’re watching, and that could have a really chilling effect on innovation on the Net.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think that the election of Barack Obama will mean for Comcast? He’s already said that he’s going to make some changes at the FCC. Does the company have an even stronger adversary now?

DANIEL ROTH: I think so. I mean, the people who have been advising Obama on what to do with the FCC are very, very big network neutrality proponents, and they are, at least according [LAUGHS] to their blogs and what they've written in the past, very anti-Comcast actions. Comcast is not going to go through a honeymoon period here with the Obama Administration.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right, thank you very much.

DANIEL ROTH: Thank you for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Daniel Roth is a senior writer for Wired Magazine.