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I''m all for neutrality -- that is I don't want anyone blocking the destinations I choose to visit -- or unreasonably slowing me down. However I've always been aware that people who want more bandwidth can buy it if they are willing to pay for it.

In a sense Bitorrent is an access protocol and when you buy bandwidth you purchase access to the pipes out there. However networks are dimensioned based on shared resources. Clearly Comcast as well as other ISP's dimensioned their networks with ratios somewhere in the 30:1 range if they are like most ISP's. That means that 30 users of a particular access speed are sharing the bandwidth they purhcased -- unless they bought guaranteed bandwidth -- which is uncommon among retail users.

Along comes Bitorrent which gives users to the ability fill the queue with requests for a constant stream of data that maxes out the bandwidth they purchased and does it in ways that allows Bitorrent to dominate the shared data. Also the user can just walk away and let that baby pump data at rates that are much higher than anyone anticipated -- effectively putting them into a class of bandwidth usage that is much higher than was ever calculated when the ISP dimensioned the network. Effectively this means that users who do not use Bitorrent or use it in very limited ways are losing performance due to the heavy data users with the Bitorrent clients.

That also means that the ISP has to either buy more bandwidth, charge higher rates, or both in order to bring performance up to expected levels. It is just a matter of who pays for it. Either you continue to get non bitorrent customers to subsidize the BT users or you raise the monthly fee to bitorrent users -- or you slow down the greedy bitorrent requests. This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship because it does not limit access to destinations nor filter content out. It slows down whatever the BT user is requesting in order to even out the data flow to provide more balanced service to its user base.

It all boils down to "someone has to pay for the increased demand for resources". One group is screaming censorship (falsely) in order to protect the sweet deal they have which requires low volume users to pay for the extra bandwidth consumption. Frankly I think that BT client users should either accept that they will have to have a bit slower service with their BT client during peak congestion OR they should have to pay a bit extra for the privilege of max speed at all times.

Really enjoy reading your stuff, keep it coming.