Comcast has announced that it is going to do packet shaping in a protocol agnostic way according to an article from news.com.  Some people would think that this is a great thing especially those using bit torrent which has been unfairly slowed by many Internet service providers.  You may think the bit torrent is only used for people to steal copyright in material but it turns out that the tour is being used in more places lately and it is important that traffic is not being shaped.  A good example is Skype which use bit torrent for their connection process and for any of those who use the Penn College network they know how terrible Skype has been working lately I believe it to be because of the way to packet shaping on their network.  If I go to any other person’s house Skype works fine and it really doesn’t require a whole lot of bandwidth to use Skype but on the Penn college network it doesn’t work at all half the time because of the low priority that it’s given because of the use bit torrent.  The interesting thing that Comcast is doing here is that they’re going to be doing packet shaping without looking at protocol which sounds like it would be a better solution to most people.  To me it’s actually a worse solution because I am guessing that the way they’re going to implement this is through deep packet analysis which actually puts more overhead on the network and protocol analysis.  People seem to forget that all this crap that they’re putting on like the pix and packet shaping technologies are actually slowing down our network.  Also doing deep packet analysis from a legal standpoint could be very detrimental to these ISPs.  If you know anything about the Digital millennium copyright act and the safe harbor provisions within that you know that the only way that the ISPs are not in trouble for the information that they’re carrying across their network is because they supposedly cannot see any of the content on their network.  Once you start to do deep packet analysis and can see the information across a network I believe based on the walls in the United States they are completely responsible for anything going across their wire is to have full vision of what content is there.  This opens them up to lawsuits directly from any content rights holder and makes them a culprit in any civil lawsuit or criminal lawsuit.  I personally feel that it is not the ISPs responsibility to do any surveillance of the network.  I feel that they should limit people in their upload and download speeds at their cable modem to what would be suitable for their network.  This would be a more optimal solution, in my opinion, and provide much more privacy for individuals.  I do not truly believe that the Comcast agreement is a win for anyone if they decide to go the route of deep packet analysis of packet shaping based on protocol.  However, if Comcast decides to get rid of packet shaping on together in the future that would be a huge boon to all customers who use their service.