• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer, March 31, 2008

Almost one year after some users first noticed Comcast was throttling traffic to peer-to-peer sites, the company decided to reverse course. Facing pressure from the Federal Communications Commission as well as advocates and law professors, and at least one lawsuit by a consumer, the company finally said it will work with BitTorrent to find a way to manage traffic that doesn't depend on discriminating against certain types of protocols.

While the deal sounds like a win for net neutrality, observers are cautioning people not to get their hopes up too quickly. Tech columnist Larry Magid asks what's to prevent Comcast or other ISPs from again interfering with traffic. "There is nothing -- other than possibly market forces - to stop [Comcast] or other companies from engaging in similar or worse tactics in the future," he wrote in Sunday's San Jose Mercury News. And Business Week's Peter Burrows says Comcast's change of heart "is more about solving a nasty PR problem, than in truly working with P2P providers to better handle the rising tide of online video traffic."

It would be easy to write off this mistrust as paranoia were it not for Comcast's history on this issue. Last year, the company let complaints of traffic degradation fester for months without explaining itself. Only after the Associated Press investigated in October, months after users first complained, did Comcast finally admit it interfered with traffic to peer-to-peer sites.

What's more, it took an FCC investigation before Comcast retreated from its position that interfering with traffic to peer-to-peer sites was a reasonable traffic management technique. So, while Comcast now says it's committed to protocol agnostic traffic management, it's understandable that people want to wait and see exactly when and how Comcast intends to deploy such techniques.

Meanwhile, some companies and digital rights activists are exploring ways to take traffic management into their own hands. The Electronic Frontier Foundation late last week posted links to tools in development that aim to give consumers more information about how ISPs are shaping traffic.