Why is sql server waiting for acknowledgment?

I have an application that often request a big set of rows [about 20K] from a sql view, in the mean time other applications can't update the table from where the data comes from, the update query's gets blocked by the select from the other application.

The wait code is "ASYNC_NETWORK_IO" which I found to be described as exactly whats happening by me, I quote:

This is usually where SQL Server is waiting for a client to finish consuming data. It could be that the client has asked for a very large amount of data or just that it’s consuming it really slowly because of poor programming.

Clients often process one row at a time, instead of caching the data on the client and acknowledging to SQL Server immediately.

My question is why is sql server waiting for the client to finish processing that select job, before allowing updates to occur on the table? is that a setting or a configuration that I could change?