Complaints by users about Comcast’s efforts to throttle P2P bandwidth have now culminated in a class-action settlement, with the giant cable ISP agreeing to pay out a sum to impacted users. But left unresolved are the far pricklier issues of network neutrality and ISPs’ rights to manage their networks as they see necessary. Enterprise Networking Planet has the story.
Comcast has reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit stemming from its alleged blocking of peer-to-peer traffic, agreeing to pay up to $16 million to a group of plaintiffs in a case that consolidated multiple actions against the cable giant.
A U.S. District Court judge in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District granted preliminary approval for the settlement, which takes a modest step toward resolving complaints that Comcast offered specific upload and download speeds, but then secretly throttled legal P2P file transfers.
The larger issues of Comcast’s network management practices, and the action federal regulators took against the provider in 2008, are still playing out in a federal appeals court in Washington.
