ISP Traffic Management: Will Innovation or Regulation Ensure Fairness?

Two North American telecommunications regulatory agencies are proactively entering into some gritty details of network management. The results might announce a new era of strengthened regulatory capabilities to enforce net neutrality. The new traffic-management discussion centers on how far Internet service providers (ISPs) can go in limiting customers' bandwidth and how much information they must disclose about how they're doing it. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission found that cable ISP Comcast illegally used deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to throttle application-specific P2P packets. Specifically, Comcast separated BitTorrent P2P packets from the message transport, then used TCP reset packets to make the P2P packets look as though they were coming from other end users' computers.