As amazing as it may seem, corporations’ behavior can change when federal regulators decide to step in. TorrentFreak reports on a new study from Measurement Lab showing that Comcast (CMCSA) has dramatically reduced the amount of BitTorrent traffic shaping it does despite being one of the worst offenders in the industry just a few years ago. Overall, the study found that Comcast has throttled just 3% of all BitTorrent traffic on its network in 2012, a significant drop from the days when it would routinely throttle around 50% of BitTorrent traffic.
The reason for this change of heart is pretty simple: the Federal Communications Commission slapped Comcast hard for its traffic-shaping policies and barred the company from targeting individual protocols such as BitTorrent when managing traffic on its networks. What’s more, the FCC’s actions seem to have had an impact on other ISPs as well, as Measurement Lab found American ISPs now throttle, at most, 6% of BitTorrent traffic on their networks while ISPs in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom routinely throttle more than two-thirds of BitTorrent traffic on their networks.
