The FCC has ruled that Comcast is violating internet rules in their continued effort to block BitTorrent traffic:
The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.
"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."
A lot of people hear BitTorrent and think of illegal file swapping. That is a reasonable concern, but there are also a lot of legitimate uses for BitTorrent and for Comcast to punish those legitimate users simply because some people use the technology for illegal purposes is wrong. Of course there are other problems presented here. A main one being the fact that a large portion of this country has no competition in deciding who their internet provider is. If they don't chose a company like Comcast, or any of the other giants, then they are stuck with dial-up internet, or one of the other, more costly, solutions, such as satellite internet.
Hopefully this will put us a step closer to getting some actual net neutrality legislation, something that is long over do.
