Meh. I live in Canada, and my provider has been doing something similar for years. It took about a month or two after it was introduced before someone had written an encryption patch for a couple of bittorrent clients, and presto: bandwidth throttled up again in no time.

Commercial interests can do whatever they feel is in their best interests. They're a private company, and if you don't like it, get your internet elsewhere. But all the paid programmers working on the problem take years to develop a blocking technique that takes bored hobbyists no time to get around. It's not practical, and will eventually go the same way as DRM.

While it would be nice to see them get hit with a fine, aren't there laws on the books making it a criminal act to spoof traffic in this way? Of course, laws like that never seem to end up applying to corporations; look at the Sony rootkit fiasco for plain evidence of that. Civil penatlties are nice, but if we have laws criminalizing individuals for the same acts these companies are performing, they should be applied. I have always thought that executives will think nothing of paying a fine, but will think twice about spending time in jail.

edgore, I'd love it to be that way as well, but my guess is that even in the event that charges were brought against these companies, you'd quickly see some retroactive amnesty legislation being passed...

That's crazy talk! Our Congress would never even consider such a thing! You, sir, have insulted America.

Another question would be whether Comcast is alone in this sort of policy? Are Verizon and other service providers utilizing similar tactics? It would seem that this only increases the necessity to push congress towards taking action.

The one that should land someone in prison, really.

Comcast does this with encrypted traffic. Which means they are decrypting your traffic, since you can't tell what's going on just by looking at source and destination ports, and decrypting traffic is against the law.

They do only do it to manage network traffic, I believe, because performance on PTP networks sometimes picks up dramatically in the wee hours. I've seen it jump from 12k to 400k. But my contract doesn't say I can get up to 15 meg only on traffic they specify.