Now that BitTorrent is all grown up and has been given the keys to its parents' car, ISPs are faced with the difficult decision about how to handle the protocol. Companies from around the world have been throttling the service, which can sometimes eat up three-quarters of a provider's total bandwidth. Throttling could be seen as a legitimate response to this bandwidth crunch if all BitTorrent content were illegal, but of course, it's not. So what's an ISP to do—especially if they have agreed to run a neutral network?

It didn't take long for network neutrality to reappear before Congress. Only days into the new session, two sentors [sic] have teamed up to re-introduce net neutrality legislation that failed to get a hearing last year, and the bill is already sparking very public debate.

Known as the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (S.215), the bill would require network operators to run their network in a "nondiscriminatory manner"—certain types of traffic or traffic from certain sources could not be hampered or prioritized, but operators would still be free to offer different tiers of service. The bill would also require broadband operators to offer "naked" DSL and cable modem service that does not require the purchase of other services.

Astroturf. Featured prominently in the cookie-cutter stadiums of the 60s and 70s, it is a pale imitation of the natural grass fields it replaced and attempted to resemble. In today's lexicon, astroturfing has taken on a whole new meaning: industry groups masquerading as grassroots consumer movements, usually on the Internet.

The practice of industry groups setting up faux-grassroots organizations seems to have accelerated lately, and as we have mentioned before, have become even more 'net-savvy.

Our latest exercise in astroturfing comes courtesy of the American Consumer Institute. In its press release, the group tries to score points with consumers leery of corporate welfare by helpfully pointing out that the biggest companies favoring net neutrality legislation are financially powerful, earn supracompetitive returns and have significant market power.

The ACI then concludes that in the minds of informed consumers, there should be serious questions as to how government-mandated price and service regulation will benefit the American public. Not surprising from a group that equates net neutrality with requir[ing] consumers to pay the full costs of upgrading the next generation broadband network.

A new report from the non-profit group Common Cause details the ways that industry groups are setting up fake grassroots organizations (aka "astroturf" organizations) to join the fight against Net neutrality legislation. Five such groups are profiled in the newly released report, entitled Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, Part 2: More Telecom Industry Front Groups and Astroturf. Part 1 of the series was released back in March.

Has VoIP quality been getting worse? Yes. That's the conclusion arrived at by Brix Networks, and it has real implications for the current debate over network neutrality.

Brix runs a web site called TestYourVoIP.com. As the name suggests, it lets people test the quality of their VoIP connection by placing a simulated call from the user's computer to one of several verifiers located around the world. Brix then lets customers know how well their connection works (they also offer a Google gadget that can display a weather map of current worldwide VoIP conditions). The company has archived all the data generated by these tests (nearly a million of them in the last two years) and yesterday released a report based on those numbers.

Ted Stevens (R-AK), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, has offered a compromise in the fierce fight over legislation on Internet network neutrality, but stopped short of demands sought by content companies like Google.

Google, Microsoft and other internet companies have lobbied hard for Congress to bar broadband internet service providers such as AT&T and Comcast from charging them to guarantee access and service quality, often called network neutrality.

AT&T and Comcast, two of the largest high-speed broadband internet providers, have opposed any obligations imposed on their services or restricting their business operations.

Stevens has added a new section to his proposed bill aimed at preserving consumers' ability to surf anywhere on the public internet and use any web-based application, according to the latest draft obtained by Reuters this weekend.

However, the draft by the Alaska Republican does not include a ban on pricing content companies have demanded.