One of the high level themes underlying today's FCC hearing on net neutrality is what's motivating Comcast to interfere with P2P traffic? Their answer is that they manage the use of a small number of users whose traffic my otherwise degrade the experience of the many more users who are not doing P2P.
Increasingly, P2P is being used to share or deliver video via the Internet. These video providers are increasingly competing with the Cable TV operators for audience, or in the vernacular, for eyeballs. This morning saw a demo and heard a presentation by Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze which uses P2P to distribute video programming across the net.
Factoid mentioned this morning: more content is downloaded from YouTube than was distributed across the Internet in 2000.
Verizon offers, for example, 20 megabits per second in each direction on its FiOS network and doesn't discriminate against P2P applications largely because of important architectual differences between FiOS and cable-based broadband networks.
So, why does Comcast interfere with P2P traffic? One possible answer is that they are trying to delay competition with its base Cable TV business.
