What Smoking Gun?
But so far there’s been no smoking-gun evidence that the “Internet tollbooths” Whitacre alludes to are being set up on a large scale–that major net neutrality breaches are taking place at the big ISPs. We’ve seen only borderline offenses like traffic Comcast’s recent throttling back of BitTorrent file sharing. But Comcast may have singled out BitTorrent traffic not because it’s BitTorrent traffic or because it’s file sharing traffic, but because peer-to-peer traffic eats up huge amounts of bandwidth–both upstream and downstream. Still, many people believe that some type of traffic discrimination is inevitable, and that network neutrality principles must be codified into law to prevent it. Some say that the absence of network neutrality guarantees in existing law is already hurting tech companies, and, by extension, tech consumers. “It fosters an area of uncertainty,” says Art Brodsky of Washington D.C.-based public interest group Public Knowledge. “The point is you have to wonder, if
