Coalitions are popular. A different coalition from the one I wrote about yesterday has filed an Official Action with the FCC accusing Comcast of "engaging in substantial network neutrality violations" by secretly degrading and interfering with subscribers' use of peer-to-peer services. As part of this, they ask for fines amounting to $195,000 per affected subscriber.

Comcast better watch out. I'm not sure how they can figure out how many subscribers were affected, but the numbers could grow dramatically as news of this gets out. Just in case the FCC does decide to fine them, every Comcast subscriber might immediately download Gnutella and BitTorrent and start sharing legal content such as pictures they took or public domain literature to maximize the fine. You could even use it to download Open Office or Ubuntu, or maybe to get an update to World of Warcraft, as they use BitTorrent technology as well.

Comcast even admits to "delaying" content. A senior vice president of Comcast Online Services said, "we use several network management technologies that, when necessary, enable us to delay - not block - some peer-to-peer traffic." Yet the tactic used by Comcast is to actually spoof both sides of the communication and send reset signals to both sides which drops the connection. Sure, many programs retry and reconnect eventually, but this does not fit my definition of delay. If Comcast intercepted the requests and added a time based delay and then passed them on without spoofing or interfering, then I's accept this as a delay. I'd still be pissed because they are in violation of Net Neutrality by treating data differently, but at least they would not be lying.

But what are they violating? In 2005 the FCC rejected "Net Neutrality" style rules and instead adopted an Internet Policy Statement setting out users' rights to access all lawful Internet content and applications. This same policy also says that they will not hesitate to take action to address evidence that providers of telecommunications for Internet access or IP-enabled services are violating these principles. Now we will see if the FCC was placating big business or actually has the interests of consumers as their priority.

The foes of Net Neutrality claim that it is a solution in search of a problem. Really?