Score one for the consumer.  The head of the FCC has recently announced that they are proceeding with charges against Comcast for traffic shaping, or selectively slowing down and blocking specific protocols on their internet service.

I haven’t been a very big advocate of bitorrent, but this will also prevent ISPs from messing with services such as Skype, Vonage, and other VoIP traffic (a big deal to me).

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5huAOgy6g1S5wW-7ft0FRuIypdzLQD91RD0RO0

The way I see it, everyone should be entitled to the connection speed that they sign up for, regardless of what they want to send over the line, within the guidlines of the law, of course.

This is a long shot, but I’m hoping they find proof of blocking competing services, something that has been brought up in the past:  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/139241 .

At that point, they will face an SEC investigation which will make the FCC one look like a bad dream.