Comcast Gives In

After vehemently denying that they’re discriminating by limiting peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, and thereby violating net neutrality principles, cable company Comcast has backed down.

MediaPost reports that now that it’s faced with pressure from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Comcast said Thursday it will end its practice of slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites.

The company said it will “work with BitTorrent to develop and implement a new protocol-agnostic system for handling Web traffic by the end of the year.” Comcast has been on the defensive about its network management practices since at least last October, the report said, when an investigation by The Associated Press revealed that the company was slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites.

This is significant for cell phone users because any attempt to violate net neutrality on the desktop side could give carriers all the more reason to do similar things on their already tightly-restricted data networks. Verizon even went the other way, pledging to work with P2P sharers to speed up traffic on their home DSL lines.

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