Bits reports that Comcast is running a user blacklist, under which heavy bandwidth hogs may "find that all of their online activities may slow down at peak times: from downloading movies to checking e-mail."
The story adds that Comcast will not say who's on the blacklist, how you get on it in the first place, and how or whether you can get off. A well-publicized complaint of the telecommunications companies is that a small fraction of users -- say, 5% -- can account for 50% or more of the data flowing through their lines. Those are the people who download a lot of movies, music and software -- some or most of which is not licensed.
Ars Technica wrote a similar story Tuesday about Time Warner Cable's experimental program in Beaumont, Texas. Users there will get their bandwidth capped at 5 GB per month, with $1 for every gigabyte over that. Bandwidth caps are going to stop making sense very soon, explained Ryan Paul: "Services like the iTunes store and Netflix's new Roku offering are going to making digital video delivery highly accessible to everyone."
Last weekend the Toronto Star had a story about Bell Canada Inc., which filed documents to the Canadian government detailing its practice of traffic "throttling" -- another way of saying the company chokes down the bandwidth allocations of heavy users. This absolutely non-neutral policy had, of course, been going on in secret and would not have been disclosed if not for an official complaint to the federal government by smaller Internet service providers that resell bandwidth from Bell.
So with this spike in shady, unilateral actions by companies around North America, suddenly iPower's grave predictions about a telecom conspiracy to commercialize the Internet and neuter net neutrality don't sound quite so loony.
Curve adapted from an image by Dan Taylor
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