If you haven't been following the Comcast v. BitTorrent debate that is being mediated by the FCC, get out from under that rock.  The future of the internet is being decided now and if you don't step up and tell the powers that be how you feel - you are destined to have internet programming regulated by the same clowns that bring you 20 hours of Reality TV every evening. 

I signed up for Verizon EVDO on February 28th.  I noticed in the contract that if they decided I was a 'heavy user' they would restrict my bandwidth.   I wasn't thrilled at the idea, but I only needed it for travel so I didn't expect that I'd be a candidate for throttling.   I liked the service enough that I recommend it to a friend to use instead of his Cable Internet, when he got to the store on March 5th they had changed their terms of service to a 5 Gig download cap with each additional Meg costing $0.50.  We did some math and if you streamed Music at 128Kb for the month your bill would be $148,000.  

Heavy users of the internet are about to get the shaft.  Everything else in our society has the minor user subsidizing the heavy user; Insurance, Taxes, Utilities, Public Transit.  The government has to step up and make permanent a Net Neutrality bill that makes the ISPs accountable if they start throttling services of their competitors.  There needs to be real discussion of what tiered service means, if you signup for 1.5MB does that really mean 200Kb during peak usage?

To see some important articles on the Comcast throttling incident check out our new Crowd Fusion Search which brings up articles that I'm writing and things I've flagged to keep from my news feeds..