This is an unusually bad article on net neutrality. The author seems to think that Comcast dumping consumers who use a very large amount of bandwidth is an example of the non-neutral net in action, and then argues that neutrality == piracy OMG!!!

It's pretty lame. Net neutrality isn't about making people pay for the amount of bandwidth they use. It's about degrading the quality of service in a way that favors one business over another. Pretending that the two are the same is like arguing that because I can order as much food as I want in a restaurant, I should also be able to pay to make other customers' portions smaller or their waiters surlier. There have been a lot of attempts to confuse people in this manner, but this has got to be among the weakest.

Besides, there are plenty of ways to get on Comcast's bad side without joining the pirate hordes — try running the Joost beta on a few machines for a month and see if it doesn't earn you an angry letter or two. Or try running through a few dozen Linux distros to find one that suits you. I bet Comcast wouldn't like that one bit.

Incidentally, the reason people justifiably hate Comcast's bandwidth caps isn't because they're anti-neutral — it's because Comcast won't tell its customers what the caps are. There's no hard limit set. Comcast just sends scary letters to the top X% of users every month, then terminates their contracts if they don't move themselves into the meaty part of the curve by the next bill. Upgrading to business service is a way around this, of course. But it's not priced for consumers (its cost reflects expected tax benefits as well as uptime, throughput and support guarantees that aren't relevant to the consumer market). Consequently it isn't a particularly viable option for most people, and they're left wondering whether Comcast is going to decide to drag its hungrier customers away from a buffet line that had been advertised as all-you-can-eat.