The current US FCC rules state clearly that ISPs (in the US) cannot prohibit customers from running services on the customers' computers (at home!). As a matter of fact, that is what ***ALL*** large ISPs do in the US, either by the terms (who reads them?!) or by technical means (blocking traffic), often both. In other words, you are not allowed to (or cannot) run your own web server at home, no own e-mail server at home etc.

Now, is the FCC finally enforcing a standing rule after a decade of doing nothing? Or are they still wasting time and money over nipple slips? Ha!

(.)(.)

I DIDN'T GET A HURRUMPH OUT OF THAT GUY

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"...managing network traffic is an important way to prevent high-bandwidth applications such as P2P sharing from slowing traffic for all users..."

I call shenanigans on that statement. Can we kill it already.

If a user has a 1Mb down .75Mb up connection to the net and they are only running a bit torrent client it may consume the entire 1/.75 connection. It's not going to magically eat all the bandwidth on the internet, it's not even going to consume all the bandwidth of their ISP. No 'traffic shaping' is required.

If I have a 1Mb connection and you have a 1Mb connection the fact that I'm actually using my entire connection _only_ effects you if our ISP only has 1Mb that it's reselling. That's the rub with P2P and other high bandwidth applications. Before the advent of P2P and HD video streaming users rarely used their entire allotment of bandwidth and the few times they did was relatively short lived. Overselling at the rate of 1000 to 1 or 10000 to 1 is a thing of the past if people actually get to use the bandwidth they are paying for.

If the ISP has 100 Mb of capacity and their users are using all of that bandwidth, if they go out and acquire another 100 Mb of bandwidth, some evil P2P application isn't going to somehow gobble it all up. If the user still has a 1 Mb / .75 Mb connection that's the most bandwidth they will consume.

So please, kill that meme already. The problem isn't evil P2P applications, it's ISP's overselling their network. They want the ability to throttle or otherwise 'network manage' your connection so that you only use 0.1 Mb of the 1.0 Mb connection you are paying for. In that way they can continue to oversell their network without actually having to invest in improving their capacity.