Within the last five years peer to peer file sharing (P2P) has led to dramatic increases in the consumption of available bandwidth by users. The first institutions to confront this problem were our universities where early Generation Y adults were quickly experimenting with P2P to transfer first music, then television, and movies. Regardless of if the content was legally obtained or disseminated in accordance with copyright law the geometric increases in bandwidth by users presented network nightmares.

Universities at first attempted, much like ComCast, to simply ban the offending applications. However, this issue was problematic due to the growth in the number of p2p applications, increasing use of p2p file transfer for legitimate reasons (NASA distributes some of their research findings using BitTorrent-Visible Earth as an example)[1], and the students ability to "hide" their application from blocking devices through virtual private networks. In the end, most Universities created bandwidth limitations for students within a arbitrary time (usually a rolling 24 hour window). If a student exceeded his/her cap they were "rate limited" severely compromising their ability use the Internet and allowing only minimal application support such as email.

Fast-forward five years and the technical challenge of P2P networks faced by Universities is now being the dominant network concern of most commercial Internet Service Providers. Comcast, perhaps more aggressive then other ISPs, decided to target a specific P2P application known as Bitttorrent and effectively killed its on their network. This resulted in a suit brought before the FCC which was just recently adjudicated.

What you see when you look at the FCC's Comcast decision depends in large part on your viewpoint. While Comcast specific action was determined to be illegal the general concept of prioritized traffic (if clearly communicated to users and application agnostic) was endorsed. As Tom Steinert-Threlked of ZDNet noted, "The idea that all traffic on the net should be carried with equal best efforts is not what got endorsed Friday. Comcast and other Internet service providers can and (likely) will start prioritizing traffic, even creating tiers of service.With the FCC chairman’s blessing, as long as it’s openly done."[2]

Tiered approaches to service are already being experimented with in the US. Time Warner is currently testing services in Texas that allow users to choose their tier of service that basically function as the Universities rate limit previously described. However, in the case of the commercial customer if you exceed your prescribed tier you can pay more to continue to have network access.[3]

Even Vint Cerf, creator of the TCP/IP protocol has recently acknowledges the need for more managed networks. As opposed to rate limits, Cerf advocates transmission rate caps which guarantee, in an application agnostic way, consumers a consistent minimum rate of data speed[4]. If the user has applications wants better performance they can move up to the next transmission level. The fundamental difference between this and today's ISP contracts are that the minimum level of connectivity would be guaranteed.

Regardless of what type of system is implemented the nature of the question is not if, but when, networks will become more regulated.