Comcast has placed new anti-Bittorrent restrictions in place, limiting download speeds and, crucially, preventing those with completed downloads from "seeding" — continuing to contribute to the Bittorrent swarm. Eliminating seeders cripples a swarm; if enough ISPs did it, the efficiency of the protocol would plummet. Many swarms would no longer be viable.

Encryption doesn't seem to help. The protocol's creator, Bram Cohen, warned that BT encryption was a bad and pointless idea, and is being proven right as ISPs like Rogers simply throttle all encrypted traffic. There's a workaround for the Comcast measures if you've got a Linux firewall, but of course most folks don't.

Admittedly, this doesn't rank among the greatest injustices in human history. Most of the affected activity involves copyright infringement. But not all. And this issue will become increasingly relevant and legitimized as bandwidth-intensive data services proliferate — movies will be downloaded by your Tivo, game consoles will download ever-larger game demos and add-ons. People will start to notice that ISPs can capriciously degrade service when their accounting departments demand it. And people won't like it.

I think the solution is metered bandwidth. The Slashdotters want it, too. Right now the price jump from consumer service to business service is too large — who's going to pay double the price simply for a contract with terms that Comcast actually has to obey? We need more granular pricing, and metered bandwidth is the obvious way to provide it.