New Legislation Could Eventually Lead to ISP Throttling Ban

An anonymous reader writes "Comcast's response to the FCC may have triggered a new avenue of discussion on the subject of Net Neutrality. Rep. Ed Markey (D — Mass.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, introduced a bill yesterday whose end result could be the penalization of bandwidth throttling to paying customers. 'The bill, tentatively entitled the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, would not actually declare throttling illegal specifically. Instead, it would call upon the Federal Communications Commission to hold a hearing to determine whether or not throttling is a bad thing, and whether it has the right to take action to stop it.'"

Comments

What about the other end?

[suso]

I wonder if this will have any effect on web/application hosting providers who are using traffic shaping to allocate only a certain amount of bandwidth (such as 3Mbit even though they advertise having larger backbones). Or could it be applied to modules like mod_bandwidth where hosting providers cut off your web hosting if you exceed a certain amount?

Re:net neutrality

[yincrash]

also, isn't this a dangerous game that comcast is playing? if you're saying you're taking responsibility for throttling based on content, are you responsible if you know specifically illegal content is flowing through your pipes?