Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; Net Neutrality; and Network Management

"According to an Oct. 19 article by the Associated Press, Comcast has been actively degrading and
blocking BitTorrent traffic, amounting to "the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S.
Internet service provider." This is the latest and most clear cut incident illustrating the need for "network
neutrality" principles for the Internet. This factsheet provides a technological backgrounder on what
Comcast is blocking and how the company does it."

Comcast has been blocking the sharing of certain files on their users network as a means of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers.

"Imagine a device that sits inline in a major ISP's network and can throttle P2P traffic at differing levels depending on the time of day. Imagine a device that allows one user access only to e-mail and the Web while allowing a higher-paying user to use VoIP and BitTorrent. Imagine a device that protects against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, scans for viruses passing across the network, and siphons off requested traffic for law enforcement analysis. Imagine all of this being done in real time, for 900,000 simultaneous users, and you get a sense of the power of deep packet inspection (DPI) network appliances. "