It seems that Comcast is worried that its infrastructure can’t handle the huge amount of file sharing traffic on their network and that the traffic is beginning to affect the speed of other subscriber connections.
Even worse, Comcast has started to block Internet subscribers who are using file sharing services. Comcast customers can download all the BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer content that they want without a problem. However, when they in turn try to upload it to other BitTorrent/P2P users, Comcast forbids the file transfer from completing.
This is troubling for soooo many reasons. Of course, there is no FTP or SSH throttling mentioned by Comcast yet so that’s a good thing for now, but something tells me that they may try to extend their walled-garden at some point…. and other ISPs might follow.
The only benefit I can think of us that it will hinder potential pirates in their tracks, but at the same time there are millions and millions of people using FTP and P2P every day to legally share and move all types of files.
This is a great example of why Comcast is my X-ISP!