What the original Comcast contract said, in typical tiny legalese, on the contract YOU agreed to (in America verbal contracts are legally binding), was that they retain the right to adjust your Internet speed based on network traffic and other network service events in order to maintain adequate access for everyone.

Understand that it boils down to having a single router servicing your entire neighborhood, and behind that router you are ALL sharing the common bandwidth pool. This is for security reasons and also for economics since it would be cost-prohibitive for them to give every customer an industrial router.

I don’t know about you, but I would be PISSED if the neighbor kid was running a p2p file-sharing super-node and sucking up 95% of available neighborhood bandwidth all the time, especially on the rare occasions that I need to download a Microsoft or World of Warcraft patch. That would lengthen my download time from a minute to an hour in some cases. No Thank You.

Note also that the contract you agreed to ALSO says that you are not allowed to run a “server”, and let’s face it, anyone who is allowing files to be shared from their computer is “serving files” under any definition, regardless if they know they are or not. Thus, they have FULL CONTRACTUAL RIGHT to throttle or even ban your connection for violating their terms of service (TOS) contract. Period. These are simply the facts.

Now, as far as the touchy-feely liberal mindset goes, yes, of course, it would be nice for them to call or email every one of their customers and tell them in plain words these things…but there is no legal requirement for them to do so, aside from the cost and personnel issues. Your morals are being called into play here, and it makes you uncomfortable, thus the angry and EMOTIONAL responses to this topic. but I digress…

Bottom line, the FCC decision is probably not the correct one but Comcast will adapt. Plus they will find a way to manage their network and accomplish the same thing, in a manner that does not run afoul of laws or the FCC ruling, thus you have just made it more difficult for people in the future by causing them to expend time and money on repairing holes in their contract wording and their advertising wording. Don’t kid yourselves, nothing has changed at all in the long run, and I expect that MY bandwidth will still be preserved for when *I* want to download large amounts at high rates of speed.

Ok, end of devil’s advocate. Thoughtful comments are appreciated, the rest aren’t.

Hopefully we’ll get a legit explanation. It may be useful in dealing with other throttling ISP’s…