The FCC pretty much gave Comcast a slap in the face and made it clear it has no right to interfere or restrict what protocols it’s clients request (no formal action taken yet). The whole time Comcast argued that throttling P2P was an effective way of reducing and controlling the network congestion created by this specific protocol. And so far we know what the FCC thinks of all this.
The fact that the FCC agrees that ISP’s manipulating the protocols it’s wrong but also fails to prevent the trend by the big providers of placing bandwidth caps. Comcast is the shinning example of what the ISP’s really want which is full control over the network and what goes through the same network. The original plan called for
- Regaining control over the over subscribed lines
- limit or restrict protocols that may be use for entertainment
- place limits on the amount of bandwidth (prices won’t go down)
- offer preferential services for a fee
The amounts of bandwidth hungry applications has increased that’s a fact and the ISP’s have no intentions for upgrading the networks to meet the demands instead they want to treat bandwidth like a limited resource. The sad reality is that P2P offers a truly distributed medium with a lot of potential if optimized. Perhaps they could make use of the masses and redistribute the content at a local level. But controlling not optimizing the network is in their best interest, bandwidth caps are inevitable.
I just would like to say that we live in the United States not in Australia meaning our traffic has no need to travel across the ocean to reach the country where most sites are hosted, so why should I be held to the same standards as the Australians?.
- http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080711-comcast-loses-fcc-head-slams-companys-p2p-filtering.html
- http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5huAOgy6g1S5wW-7ft0FRuIypdzLQD91RD0RO0
