Salon writer Farhad Manjoo reports that Comcast and BitTorrent have hammered out an agreement: “Comcast will now slow down access for people consuming the most network bandwidth, and will no longer delay specific applications (such as BitTorrent).”
Imagine if Comcast decided to slow down Firefox for everyone because some of its users download far more Web pages than users of Internet Explorer. It’s crazy to imagine it — but the company’s BitTorrent block was really not much different.
Of course, Comcast gives itself until the end of the year to implement this new policy, which seems just a tad slow to me. Still, it looks like Comcast realized that it was going to have to treat the bits neutrally, whether it wanted to or not. Will this act put a dent in the political impetus for legislated network neutrality?
