Comcast has been in the news lately for their questionable practice of throttling Bittorrent traffic across its network. Apparently they have changed their mind and seem to be planning to stop targeting the popular Peer to Peer service. While they are probably doing this begrudgingly, the latest rounds of FCC hearings and pressure likely have something to do with their decision.

For those of you who may be unaware of this, Bittorrent is a popular P2P client that allows users to download large files from the Internet. While it has many uses and is popular among open source software as a means of distribution, it is also popular among software, music, and movie pirates as well which has earned it some scorn from groups such as the RIAA and MPAA. Comcast has been throttling and interfering with bittorrent traffic, causing net neutrality advocates as well as many tech users to grow upset with Comcast's tactics. A little while back, the FCC held hearings on what Comcast was doing to look into further actions. Comcast was caught paying people to show up and take up seats to prevent Comcast opponents from participating in the hearings.

This decision, while good news for those against internet filters and traffic managing, may be too good to be true as Comcast still appears to be working on new methods to manage network traffic, so we shall see what fully comes of this.

Personally, I don't believe in internet filtering and disapproved with Comcast's tactics for a while. I feel that people should be able to access what they want without having to worry about their ISP blocking them (at work is a different story, but thats not an ISP). I have recently switched to Verizon FiOS and couldn't be happier.

Comcast Backs Off BitTorrent, will Continue to Manage Internet Traffic [engadget.com]

Tags: bittorrent, comcast, filtering