Whilst keeping an eye on the Comcast charm offensive to avoid FCC action for their misleading and unethical throttling of consumers I saw this article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7354133.stmTough action is required by US regulators to protect the principles that have made the net so successful, a leading digital rights lawyer has said.
Professor Lawrence Lessig was speaking at a public meeting to debate the tactics some net firms use to manage data traffic at busy times.
He said the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) should act to keep all net traffic flowing equally.
The seven-hour public meeting was held at Stanford University and featured presentations from Prof Lessing, songwriters, network administrators and net engineers.
Prof Lessig said one of the principles that guided the foundation of the net was that all traffic should flow equally across it.
This principle of net neutrality, he said, was being eroded as net firms manage traffic and place restrictions on what their domestic broadband customers can do.
The meeting was called by the FCC in reaction to the news that US net firm Comcast had been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The FCC has started a formal investigation to see if Comcast merits a fine for its actions.
In response to the publicity surrounding its actions, Comcast has said it would change its policy.
Prof Lessig said there had to be clear rules, perhaps involving financial incentives, to force net firms to respect net neutrality. Current rules, he warned, meant that many firms were tempted to manage traffic to protect profits.
In all cases of throttling one thing has to be born in mind, is the service being used as advertised by the ISP ?
In many cases it most certainly is not, and while many are bamboozled with false claims of a small percentage of users hogging all the bandwidth one has only to stop for a minute and engage their brains to see this just isnt possible, if they did so they would hit their monthly limit and be capped, unless of course they where sold unlimited packages, and this being the case why should they not make use of a service they have purchased, lets see iSP companies selling more honestly and put people before excessive profits, after all if they look after us we will look after them.
And regardless of any wild claims, folks can and do reach a "content saturation level".
