Check it out, a US FCC ruled that ISPs have no right to throttle or interfere with customer's traffic.

Anyone know what's going on with UK and Virgin now?

Technically this is little to do with net neutrality. Net Neutrality relates to the internet being sold like cable TV, you pay for certain packages that allow access to certain websites. People are very against this.

This ruling is more a victory for the torrenting community, who have long suspected that comcast is throttling their upload torrent bandwidth. This has been proven true and they've been ordered not to do it.

I did enjoy the judge's analogy to the comcast guys "Would you think it's fair if the post office opened all your letters and deemed if they weren't good enough, they'd put them aside for a few days before delivering it? Or in some cases, not bother delivering them at all if they wanted? No, that's a misuse of the postal system, and you're doing exactly the same thing to the internet"

Virgin are still being rather cagy about the whole thing. They've signed a deal with some music governing body here in the UK where they're going to monitor all their customers for illegal activity, if they catch them doing it, there's a 3 strikes rule. First you get a letter, then a final warning, then you're cut off and blacklisted.

However they don't seem to be going after everyone, half the student houses I know used Virgin broadband and student houses are rife with mp3 downloads, nobody has had a letter as of yet.

They're also adopting a "do as we say" strategy. In the one case I've read of a letter being sent, the mp3 he was accused of downloading was something he or his partner would never listen to in a million years, so he sent a letter to Virgin mentioning this and the fact he uses an unsecured wireless network. Their reply was "secure it or we'll cut you off if it happens any more... even if it wasn't you". This is a bit pushy, as their jurisdiction over customers network setup stops at their cable modem. They have no right to tell us what routers we can use and how they should be set up, but they still seem to think they can.

This is great news. The internet has always been a bastion against censorship, so let's keep it that way.

stompy:
This is great news. The internet has always been a bastion against censorship, so let's keep it that way.

I agree, this great. Score one for the good guys... and 4chan.

Fancy meeting you here stompy ;)