Net Neutrality: Comcast Finally Stops Squeezing Heavy Net Users (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com

Just three days after the FCC abolished Obama-era net neutrality rules guaranteeing that internet service providers treat all data equally, one of the United States' largest ISPs made a seemingly benevolent gesture—saying it would finally put a halt to its decade old-practice of “data throttling.”

“Throttling” refers to the practice of an ISP deliberately slowing data transmission speeds for certain users, or for certain online sites. Comcast started throttling data for heavy internet users in 2008, at the height of the “torrenting” phenomenon when internet users regularly deployed apps, such as BitTorrent and others, to upload and download mostly illegal data, such as copyright-violating music and video files.

The move also comes after states began the process of imposing their own net neutrality rules, with Washington becoming the first to put its own net neutrality legislation into effect, as AVN.com reported on Wednesday. The California state senate also recently approved a bill that would create a net neutrality framework in that state, which has the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Comcast did not specify whether its latest move to end throttling was connected to the state net neutrality moves, but the company did say that it may re-impose a throttling system in the future, according to the tech news site ZD Net.

Throttling could be a a particular problem for porn consumers, who regularly stream or download large video files. It certainly was a problem in the peak torrenting era when, according to one study, 14 percent of all files shared using the app were porn.