Comcast

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/fcc_comcast_landmark/

Given my past criticism of Net Neutrality fanatics, there should be little doubt where I stand on this. This is an honest to goodness failure of the model that the net neutrality people held up as THE STANDARD for how to run an internet, handling all packet intelligence at the endpoints and having the middle be a big, dumb pipe. Bittorrent though cheats by flooding the net with connection requests drowning out other traffic. On most networks this successfully improves the speed of bittorrent downloads, but on older cable systems it will actually hurt both bittorrent and other traffic. 

Comcast added a small bit of logic in the pipe that, according to The Register, reset a portion of the BT connection requests and managed to improve both the bittorrent performance and the performance of everything else as well.

And the net neutrality people threw a fit…

Comcast has since replaced the system and will be throttling users by their local pipe on the number of things they send out, regardless of if they’re bittorrent or not which should lead to a bigger improvement for most and a major decrease for heavy users… but their old solution really doesn’t seem like the evil monster it was made out to be as long as it is used as a temporary measure. It doesn’t discriminate by source, website, content, at all except to correct aberrant behavior in one application while still allowing that application’s data to go through otherwise unmolested. 

I just don’t get folks who want to force their worldview on all others regardless of the contracts those others have agreed to themselves. People are so strange, What’s best for one person isn’t necessarily good for others, so that one person should quit inflicting whats best for them on others.