Today Comcast, America’s largest broadband ISP, will begin capping customers’ home internet usage at 250GB per month. This is in addition (subtraction?) to already blocking your access to the services they decide they don’t like, like your own site’s email servers, or BitTorrent and other social technologies.

The initial cap may seem high, and you might not even know what BitTorrent is. You may not even realize Comcast is deciding for you what you can and can’t do, because you don’t care to do any of the forbidden things - like surf too much, or connect to the wrong port number. Since Comcast certainly doesn’t publicize their service’s limitations, many users see an error or a timeout trying to connect to a legitimate service, and feel they’ve done something wrong or set up their systems incorrectly. Only after some Comcast support(!) and Google searching do they discover that it’s not their fault: It’s something they aren’t allowed to do.

Even if you use only a few hundred megabytes of bandwidth this month, it’s almost certainly hundreds of times more than you used in, say, October of 1998. And you consume that “small” amount of bandwidth connecting to online video, syndication feeds, photo libraries, good web-based email, and dozens of other features and services that even your geekiest friends hadn’t heard of back then. Every user’s bandwidth needs increase with the utility of a network that offers greater and wider services to every visitor to every site. As written in the whitepaper at the link above (via Ma.tt), “today’s power users are tomorrow’s average users.” Today Comcast took another in a string of actions forming a pattern of opposition to an expanding and increasingly useful Internet.

While this doesn’t directly affect anything we do at Utopian.net - we don’t use any Comcast services - it does hurt some of our customers who rely on Comcast to connect their home. Comcast’s increasingly un-neutral behavior can deteriorate their experience using their own site, just as it can impede their free access to every other site on the net. That’s something I care about, just like I care about the larger issue of an Open Internet. So if you’re a Comcast customer, I recommend you switch - and let them know why on the way out. Not every area offers multiple broadband options, but you can still let Comcast know you don’t appreciate them selling you access to an increasingly limited, and limiting, Internet.

After a long time in a hospital tank and at last a clean bill of health, my survivor fish (called “Lucky,” now) and his two new companions have all finished up quarantine time, waited out the cycling, and are at home in their new place. Since we’ve been watching a non-stop MST3K marathon since about June, the two new cellmates have been tentatively christened “Crow” and “Servo.”

The pictured fish has had almost as many names as color changes. I got him as a mottled orange-black pond fish. He dropped the spots, survived the raccoons, and has turned Ancient Chinese Imperial Yellow to mark his move from the wilds of a 30 gallon stock tank in my backyard to the dimmer lights of civilization above his 30 gallon bow-front.

We started a water tank to water the garden. We started the fish to eat the mosquitos that bred on “the pond.” The raccoons ate the fish… There is an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly chain of events leading to this aquarium that makes me like it more. And we still dump the water changes on the herb garden.