[Macworld]

Post your comments for Inside Net Neutrality: Is your ISP filtering content? here

[guzzisport]

Har har. I've already got that. It's called Hughes.net. Tiered service, arbitrary limitations on download sizes etc. All this and an average 85K speed for only $60 a month. If the rest of the internet goes this way, we'll all be going back to smoke signals and sneakernet.

[TYates]

There probably would be no "throttling" or "filtering" if the ISP's were just ISP's. The reality is that most ISP's are cable companies that offer more services than just access to the Internet, such as phone, movies, and pay-per-view products. The cable companies being a "content provider" have just as much to lose as the "content producers". Should we expect them to provide access to their competitors products without balking? As a consumer of these products, I love competition, and I think its great that I can bypass the services my cable company offers to get better pricing for the same content via iTunes and an Apple TV like device. My cable company on the other hand is a tad less than thrilled, the tail has stopped wagging.
The question may come down to identifying access to the internet, and access to or through an application like iTunes, or Vonage, especially if providing such access is at their expense, that expense being lost revenue to the very services they offer.
Internet access is being discussed as if it were a public works, which it isn't, not yet anyway. Maybe it should be, but would we trust anyone operating a publicly funded national ISP? Of course not. So where does that put us?
The Internet is over. Please unplug your modem and go back to doing whatever it was you were doing in 1993. Come on now, move along, there's nothing to see here.

[charlieartist]

How much of the P2P issue is copyright liability?
Look at other content (non-digital, too): Try getting photos (that look professional) copied at a photo store--most won't without a release. Commercial printers also want to cover themselves. Same for online content. I'm in design, and it is a significant concern. Many times, people don't understand this.
Sure, there is the profit issue, but other factors as well...

[robertinboston]

I can't really blame them. It is a question of bandwidth. We had a user on a company LAN start using his computer for Bit Torrent video file transfers. Our network slowed to a crawl. It was like being back to dial up service. I eventually figured out the problem and was able to limit his bandwidth to preserve the network performance for other users. Comcast is basically doing the same thing.

[ronjamin]

The problem is that you are buying a service....if the service says you get this much speed and bandwidth, then you should be able to use every last drop of it.
I disagree with those who say it's the ISP's right to throttle back on certian uses.
The real problem is that they do not offer real choices. Comcast has begun to offer different packages. This is a good step. There are people that can't get enough bandwidth......well, I say give it to them. Likewise, there are people who only need to surf Ebay or get email....likewise, give it to them.
There is no need to punish customers. As I see it, there is a great demand for large data pipes. Sounds more like an opportunity than a problem.
But thats just me........

[Totally_lost]

IFF (that is If, and Only If) we lived in a utopian world with universal infinite free bandwidth, then the implicit assumptions this article is based on, would indeed support the the authors assertions, position, and conclusions.
Our society, technology, and businesses however exist in the real world where fairness, resources, and markets are constrained by free market forces.
First, what is your fair share of the bandwidth from your ISP? If you are paying for a fiber or T-1 connection to a tier 1 backbone provider, with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) clearly stating they will deliver 100% of link bandwidth 100% of the time, then that is your fair share. Costs for this SLA generally start about $1k/mo and rise with bandwidth. Any other Fiber, T1, DSL, Cable, Ethernet, Wireless, or other broadband connection without a 100%/100% SLA, implicitly means your network connection is oversubscribed and you are sharing connections and bandwidth with other users, and YOUR fair share of that connection is less than 100% of the time and/or bandwidth. With sharing comes social responsibility and/or controls to allocate the shared resource. A typical residential broadband connection is generally oversubscribed better than 50:1 to the internet backbone, meaning the residential consumers fair share is about 1/50th of their nominal purchased connection speed.
Any free market ISP which is unable to at least break even, will run short on cash and be in bankruptcy soon. Nearly all free market ISP operations must yield either pay checks for employees and investors, or the business will be closed.
Any ISP offering unlimited fixed rate service is probably overcharging a large number of light users to pay for the resource usage of a few heavy users (IE light users pay more per MB than heavy users do). If distribution and bandwidth are universally free (local, national, and international distribution infrastructure are provided by government taxes), then this model might be ok. If the ISP incurs significant expenses for backbone access, and has to build out their own distribution network (routers, cable, switches, etc) then there is a real cost for bandwidth that should be fairly allocated to the users consuming it. Nearly all free market countries have this market problem, and socialist contries providing universal governmental infrastructure do not.
The fairest system for all users, is simply the electric power model, charge a base rate for the basic connection to cover billing and local loop costs, and then cover core distribution infrastructure and backbone bandwidth using pure metered service. In this model, all users pay just their own fair share. This model also has natural conservation of resources, as people will only use the resources they are actually willing to pay for. This model also inhibits people also just downloading 6TB of disk space every month with data they are unlikely to every really use, simply because the network bandwidth is free.
In the real world, saturated networks drop packets, which seriously slow interactive network access to a crawl, while only mildly impacting non-interactive bulk downloads and file sharing. This translates into the light users getting "screwed" and the heavy users rudely taking more than their fair share impacting other users. In a free market, the light users will vote with their feet, and move to the service that is faster for them. Since these users are were ALL the profit is, it's natural for any ISP to look for ways to send the bandwidth hogs that actually cost more than they pay elsewhere, and do everything possible to attract and keep the light users that actually produce a profit.
Most internet users could have $10/mo 3mbps metered service with better than 60:1 over subscription and get better service than they do today sharing unlimited flat rate service with bandwidth hogs -- and the ISP would get a better return on investment, and be able to pay more people higher wages. Unfortunately, the current model strains infrastructure capacity, holds down return on investment and wages, and yeild poorer service to 95% of the customers. Just so a few heavy users get more than their share.