Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting otherplayers squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.
But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popularBittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.
Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.
When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.
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