Talk about sinking to a new low. It seems that Comcast and perhaps other ISPs are blocking access to the notorious torrent site, ThePirateBay.org. The word comes from TorrentFreak who also reached out to the TPB team who indicated that they can’t confirm if an ISP is blocking the site but “there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S.” All I know is I, a Comcast subscriber, cannot access the site.

Comcast isn’t exactly known to be friendly with the downloaders or streamers. In the past they’ve limited and even blocked seeding of torrent files. The term throttling was synonymous with Comcast a few years back. The company eventually entered into a partnership with BitTorrent, Inc and was later asked by the FCC to stop the practices, but perhaps the company just moved to block specific sites in an effort to kill the bandwidth-sucking practice of torrenting.

Like TorrentFreak I ran a couple of quick network checks on ThePirateBay from my Comcast connection and traceroutes and pings come back kosher. As of 9:30am EDT I could not access ThePirateBay on my main desktop computer. I then grabbed a Verizon Xoom, which also failed to connect to the site when on WiFi mode. However, when using Verizon 3G, the site loads without an issue.

So what’s a torrent-addicted Comcast subscriber supposed to do? Well, good friend, I have some solutions for you. First, freeproxyserver.net is a quick and dirty way around the blockage. But you might also want to look at — damn, I’m going to break a rule here — usenet. That’s all I’m going to say because like that other place, the first rule of usenet is not to talk about usenet. You could also look into more discrete torrent sites as ones with private trackers and strict rules generally fly under the radar.

Comcast has yet to comment on this issue and they might never. Everything is pure speculation without an official Comcast statement. Perhaps the site will suddenly work again for Comcast subs. Funny how that works sometimes, eh?

In other Comcast related news, this just happened mere months after this.

Update: Comcast reached out and indicated that they are not blocking the site, and reminded, as mentioned above, the site is not accessible from other ISPs either. They link to this part of their FAQ page, which indicates that they do not block peer-to-peer traffic although that was never part of the original argument as the torrent traffic goes through fine, it’s just access to the site that was limited.