After it has been proved that Comcast have been short changing users of BitTorrent from having the full speeds that customers have been paying for, the cable internet company decided to make it official by burying in their fine print riddled Terms of Service agreement. According to Ars technica, a representative from the company stats that this is the first change in two years.


After it was found that Comcast practices of limiting internet speeds to customers there was a class-action lawsuit by an angry customer. The FCC has been getting its own earful complaints, and according to Ars Technicas report , "Comcast has denied throttling BitTorrent traffic, saying that the ISP just "delays" or "postpones" it on occasion. One analogy used by a Comcast executive was that of trying to make a phone call and getting a busy signal for a time, until the call actually goes through. A more accurate explanation of Comcast's use of TCP reset packets, to build on the phone analogy, would be talking on the phone with someone and then both of you hearing the other's voice saying "hang up." That's the effect of the forged reset packets: convincing the BitTorrent clients that the other(s) have stopped responding."

Our Take: Comcast is just one of the companies playing consumers. Many do not know that there is a quiet battle being made again by the big companies ( like recording labels (wanting to control music prices and distribution), oil companies( deterring the electric car), Walmart (forcing companies to use China for manufacturing nearly anything it sells), to name a few) to control internet traffic and wanting to change the pricing rules to customers. For example the idea of tiers for the amount of internet access you want. Kind of like how many minutes you want for your cell phone, but with bytes. How much internet do you want to download. Now if that happens, it can hamper the way the internet is merging with our lives.
Soon video online will be mainstream, renting movies online, tv on demand, streaming music, podcasts ( online ham radio like shows), video podcasts etc... can potentially be next on the Comcast agenda. The more internet you desire, the more you pay, and if it goes beyond a certain amount the can cut you off.

Companies like Verizon are known for limiting their unlimited plans if they feel you are abusing access. We are in a world where we make calls now using the internet, entire new industries are reliant on the access you have. Who should be permitted to limit that? The companies? Google? Yahoo? The Government? Who really controls the internet? Have we become to reliant to this online abyss? Phones are now internet compliant, soon TV's will stream video using ethernet or wifi, cars will have internet access, we are literally in the beginning stages of being an internet based zombie society and we don't even pay attention to how, who nor why.

Pay attention people, we can loose control like we have with fuel, and the constitution. Let me know what you think.

Tags:Internet, Technology