Spacehunter wrote:
We have traffic shaping here. Like on my current internet plan torrents are throttled so they go rly slow. Do you guys have that in Amerika or is that currently illegal?
Trying to get my head around this somewhat.
Its currently illegal for you to get charged more if you download more. If the FCC stops enforcing net neutrality, what's probably going to happen is that you would be able to get different alottments of resources (ex. 5 gigs/month of downloads) and would probably be fined or have your service shut off if you went over, a lot like cell phone minutes.
Also, its illegal for ISPs to get kickbacks from people in order to give their sites faster (ex. AOL can't speed up AOL-affiliated sites or people that pay AOL for faster service). What people are fearing is that if we get rid of this, untold millions of sites would be reduced to a snail's crawl since they can't pay the big bucks to get their site "turbo-charged", which would cause people to stop going to them, which would then cause them to shut down, making the only sites that load up within 5 minutes be the sites that could pay huge amounts of money for the extra bandwidth (read: corporate and corporate-affiliated websites).
There is already plans from ISPs that give you an allotted amount of bandwidth available to you for a given time period. Comcast is fairly generous and gives you 250GB worth per month.