Tech writers live by analogy, so I'll start today's column with one about a hypothetical bedroom community called HomeTown.
It's a great place to live, but most of its residents work 20 miles away in the bustling metropolis of JobVille.
To keep providing schools, parks and paved streets, the government of HomeTown wants people to work there, as well as live there. That way it would get a share of the taxes from the kind of offices, stores and factories that make JobVille so successful.
The traditional way to do this is by making the town more attractive to business. But that's not enough for the mean-spirited HomeTown fathers. They want to make it harder for HomeTown residents to find jobs elsewhere, too. So they put 10 mph speed limits on all the roads to JobVille and other towns - and no speed limits on the roads to work sites in HomeTown. They call this "reasonable traffic management."
Many heavy users of Comcast's Internet service are complaining about precisely this kind of "speed discrimination" on their own roads. Along with others worried about the future of the Net, they gathered at an unusual Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard University this week.
The official subject was the boring euphemism "Net Neutrality," but it's one of the hottest issues in cyberspace today - and a topic you ignore at your peril.
The complainers were Comcast customers who like to trade videos online with a peer-to-peer file-sharing system called BitTorrent and similar software from other organizations. If you're over 30, you probably haven't heard of BitTorrent, but it's one reason why the hard drives of the young these days are crammed full of movies - mostly pirated and some only a few days out of theaters.
Unlike digital music - which requires just three megabytes of data to be transmitted for the average album track - even well-compressed movies require hundreds of megabytes, or even gigabytes of information. Transmitting that information over the Internet requires a lot of network bandwidth.
BitTorrent spreads out this load by splitting the job among multiple PCs that may be thousands of miles apart, but there's no doubt it takes a lot of network resources to download a movie.
That said, there's no proof that these downloaders have really inconvenienced other users or clogged up Comcast's operations. But the cable and Internet provider persists in slowing down the traffic of customers using BitTorrent and similar services. Since all data moves in little packets of ones and zeros, this involved Comcast doing a lot of sniffing around in its customers' private transmissions.
