This is intriguing. One of the “inventors of the Internet” (I’ve heard this title applied to quite a range of people, Al Gore included, of course), Lawrence Roberts, is involved in a company which is providing network boxes that throttle P2P traffic in order to allow other traffic to flow freely. So far:
You’ll find Anagran bandwidth fairness boxes (also called FR-1000s) in university settings now, where the P2P file transfer problem is most acute. Anagran doesn’t currently have any commercial ISP customers, but I’ll bet that they’re all looking at them.
Absolutely, and no doubt Comcast is among them. I still maintain that the best approach to dealing with P2P traffic is having an explicit public statement about your policy towards it that all your customers can read and be aware of, and then throttle/shape the traffic in such a way that other forms of traffic are unaffected during periods of network congestion. At any rate, this is another wrinkle in the always interesting net neutrality debate.
