He did ndicate sympathy for Comcast's financial considerations, saying "Comcast obviously needs to engage in some aspect of network management. The company has Limited bandwidth, and there are times when there is more demand for service than the infrastructure can support." However, the congressman stressed that "(the) management needs to occur in a more evenhanded way" and that "(Comcast) should not engage in a blanket disqualification of any category of lawful applications."
More important than the perspective of a single politician is the recent PR nightmare Comcast has faced answering allegations of deceptive practices. As we reported earlier this year, there have been numerous claims of filtering by Comcast customers, which have invariably been dismissed by company representatives and mostly ignored in the mainstream media.
At least it's been ignored until recently when both the Associated Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation conducted tests that verified consumer claims of interference with BitTorrent based file sharing. Since then, Comcast has mostly repeated statements that don't even address the allegations, primarily indicating that no applications are being blocked. However, applications don't get blocked at the network level. What Comcast is doing simply neuters some applications by limiting network functionality.
Source: Cnet News