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

"As foreshadowed at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, federal regulators this week took the first formal step into investigating complaints about how Internet service providers, such as Comcast, manage peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their networks "

"Subscribers to Verizon's high-powered fiber-optic Internet service (FiOS) are reporting that when they mistype a Web site address, they get redirected to Verizon's own search engine page -- even if they don't have Verizon's search page set as their default. "

"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.

Though legislation is unlikely this year, education groups say they haven't given up the fight to keep network owners from prioritizing web traffic according to payment.

The author give a good overview of the current Net Neutrality forecast.

"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. "

"Hollywood hasn't decided what it thinks about the whole "Net neutrality" debate, but it knows one thing: Any rules that would stunt roll-out of the next new whiz-bang filtering technologies or encourage unfettered sharing of copyrighted works over peer-to-peer networks would be very, very bad. "

Consumers Should Trust the Marketplace, Regulators Purr.