With Comcast (my provider at home and office) throttling bandwidth and people up in arms and suing, I’ve been really torn about how I feel and something that happened today deepened my troubled thinking.

As I’ve written before, I’m really agitated that Comcast is playing games with traffic shaping and I (and many others) are suffering because of it. It’s not just downloaders and uploaders of bittorrent files, heavy YouTube watchers or even those who simply use their internet connections to the fullest, it’s Comcast playing God with what we can-and-cannot-do with the pipe we’re paying for into our homes and offices.

If you’ve worked at senior levels in corporations in a strategic capacity like I have, you would see how blatantly obvious some recent defensive moves have been by companies in response to Apple, NetFlix and others offering movie download services (e.g., Time Warner tiered bandwidth pricing) let alone what’s happened in the past with voice over internet protocol (VoIP). It’s crystal clear to me that tactics like Comcast bandwidth manipulation and Time Warner’s pricing trial balloon are attempts to defend their own video businesses by putting up obstacles and barriers for these and other companies to ride on the cable distribution networks.

But what’s OK for ISP’s to do, what are we really paying for and can they legally and realistically dictate to us what we can-and-cannot-do with the Internet pipe they supply to us?

My mind was made up a long time ago: I pay you Mr. ISP and thus can use any application I want on your network. But today I was at a hospital (for a loved one having surgery) and was there for roughly five hours. With free and remarkably fast guest wireless internet access, I had ample opportunity to get work done, make Skype phone calls, send emails
and more. Today’s experience, however, sees me struggling with the black-n-whiteness of an issue that has now suddenly become gray.

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