Tag neutrality

After consistently denying it for months, Comcast just admitted they were throtlling a number of protocols since 2007. After FCC ordered them to abandon the practice in early August, they admitted to throttling traffic using a Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch 8210. The company stated they are going to change the way they manage their network by 2009. According to Comcast spokewoman Sena Fitzmaurice "The new technique does not manage congestion based on the protocol or application a consumer uses. This new technique will ensure that all customers get their fair share of bandwidth every hour of the day". In my view they are lying and greedy and if FCC was doing its job right they should have been fined considerably high for others not to imitate them. Their admission comes almost 45 days after the FCC ruling and proves how much regulation is required to keep greedy businesses in line. Regarding their upcoming 'network management' policy, I'm somewhat puzzled. In particular, I'm not quite sure how they'll ensure a fair share of bandwidth without selective throttling (or any other classification technique that would --- again --- violate the Net Neutrality rules), unless they radically change their offering to a quota-based range of offerings, place relatively low speed caps on everyone for sustained connections or increase their network bandwidth by an astronomical amount. We'll see. Update: ArsTechnica seems to have the details. Apparently the system is going to be use 'shallow packet inspection' and packet-counting triggers for throttling. It does seem ridiculous and completely unacceptable, given that many legitimate applications actually depend on high packet throughput to function properly (VoIP is a good example here). Of course, without first seeing how this works in practice it's hard to judge it, but either way either the FCC will stomp on them once again or the system is going to function without enough disruption to Comcast's (sad) subscribers.