If these ISPs market “unlimited” packages of connectivity at certain upload/download speeds, and then immediately throttle these connections (either brute-force or via DPI) specifically so that they have more capacity to sell to more suckers – err, “customers” – marketed as unlimited, this is called “fraud.” It is not a question of debate, or net neutrality, or peer to peer traffic characteristics. Fraud. If I opened a gas station that sold “unlimited” gasoline for $500 a month, and then immediately only let people get 20 gallons before I said “oh, wait, no, can’t use more than that – I won’t have any gas for other customers and how am I supposed to make a profit anyway?” – people would laugh at me, before I was charged with fraud and sent to prison for stealing money from my customers by lying about what I was selling.

These ISP are flouting long-established law when it comes to the treatment of advertised services and the consequences of intentionally lying about what you are selling – and directly profiting from it. There’s no clause in this body of law that says “oh, well, you can lie about what you sell if you really need the profits” or “well, everyone ‘knows’ that if you say you are selling one thing but deliver another, that’s what we expect so it’s all cool” – nope.

This has nothing to do with notifying customers AFTER they have purchased that you have “changed the rules” and won’t deliver what they are paying for. Nor does it matter if you bury, in 30 pages of tiny-font legalese, a note that you “reserve the right to deliver whatever the hell you feel like delivering.” If your ads say “unlimited bandwidth 2 megabits down, 800kb up” and you decide to deliver only 200kb up so you can make more money, you are committing commercial fraud.

Every one of these lying, monopolistic, self-service ISP shills should be in prison for stealing money from their customers via retroactive “capping” of advertised capacity. The fact that they are doing this capping not only to make more money, but also to handicap potential competitors and engage in other sorts of sleazy behavior makes the whole thing worse – but doesn’t change the underlying fraud. They are called “laws” because they apply to EVERYONE – not just those lacking enough lobbyists to bend the rules for their own benefit.