There seems little likelihood that the finding would have been any different if Comcast had used some alternative in-line product to effect the same restrictions. Internet service providers that are considering enacting similar technology should take note. The FCC has a wide range of enforcement options at hand including fines and license revocation.

The sad part of all this is the attempts by Comcast and other providers to paint this as a part of reasonable network management practices. The claims seem to be that P2P traffic is overwhelming the carrier pipes, that business can’t continue without blocking, and the sky will fall unless ISPs can choose to block, restrict, delay, and tarriff network traffic as they choose.

These claims are easily disproven by Arbor’s own research which shows P2P traffic as consuming about 20% of network resources. Looking across my own network management reporting on a pretty large business and consumer ISP, based on samples at 350Gb/s, I see traffic usage of 51% http, 4.66% https, 1.8% smtp, 1.12% macromedia flash, etc. The first p2p traffic protocol that shows up is gnutella at just .21%.

Lets also realize that – as often pointed out – there’s nothing preventing these ISPs from instituting bandwidth caps or raising prices. So if it’s a relatively small amount of traffic, and models already existing to detect and kick off abusers of traffic, or charge them more, why are ISPs trying to block P2P traffic? (and VoIP, but that’s a later discussion).

I can only guess that it’s more of a business decision about trying to protect business share and choke out competing business (bitorrent.tv, itunes, youtube, etc). At that’s an area where the FCC should and is required to step in. The sad part of all this is that the technology to identify and control traffic has very valid and helpful applications – it just shouldn’t be used to support a protectionist business model.