Being a consumer these days sucks. My travel around the mountain west means that I'm pretty much stuck with Verizon for good cell coverage wherever I travel. My profession pretty much ensures that my calls have been "captured" for the NSA. "Affordable" options for cable and high-speed Internet (also a requirement for this job) in my area are severely limited. So I'm stuck with Comcast, which might have been restricting my Internet activity for who knows how long.

Comcast, the AP determined, actively manages data on its network by using software to essentially masquerade as its subscribers' machines. When non-Comcast Internet subscribers request files from your Comcast-connected machine -- as happens in peer-to-peer file-sharing applications -- Comcast's technology steps in and tells the non-Comcast subscriber you're not available. This is a difficult story to explain, but it's quite important. For years, consumer advocates have been demanding that Congress and/or the Federal Communications Commission impose "network neutrality" regulations that would force broadband providers (like Comcast) to treat all data on a network equally. Lawmakers have so far failed to do so. Broadband providers, meanwhile, insist that they do treat all traffic equally, but they reserve the right to use certain technologies to "manage" data on their network. The Comcast plan suggests that broadband providers mean something very broad by "traffic management" -- including, it appears, purposefully stepping into your network sessions to shut them down.

Excellent. Some of the traffic targeted could be illegal file-sharing, but it's also things like highly legal voice over Internet phone service, like Skype, or TV like Joost, or basically any BitTorrent download. Want to get that movie from Netflix to watch on your laptop on your next flight? Only if Comcast decides to let you do it.

Case in point: To test how Comcast is managing traffic, AP reporters tried to download a version of the King James Bible using BitTorrent. The Bible, of course, is perfectly legal to trade; indeed, some people might say that putting the good book up for others to download is a blessed thing. But when AP reporters tried to download the Bible from Comcast subscribers in Philadelphia and San Francisco, they found that the connections were either blocked outright or delayed. (Downloads from other providers worked fine.)

Oh, and btw, Comcast isn't telling you, or the non-Comcast ISPs trying to communicate with it, or anybody else that they're doing this: "We rarely disclose our vendors or our processes for operating our network for competitive reasons and to protect against network abuse."

As the post author--Salon's Farhad Manjoo--points out, it's probably not just Comcast that's doing this, so while canceling your Comcast subscription might be satisfying, your replacement ISP might be doing the same thing. Manjoo is also completely correct in pointing out that what we need is a law. You guessed it, Net Neutrality.

Go to Save the Internet and take action.