A P2P bill of rights? Yeah right

I've been back and forth on email over the last few weeks
with a Herald reader who believes his internet connection is being throttled
back extensively because he is a big user of peer-to-peer file sharing systems.
I should point out that he's a legitimate user of such services - he's a sound
engineer and needs to send and receive big files. P2P is an efficient way of
doing this.

That story looks close to having a happy ending, but people
in the US are far from happy about giant cable operator Comcast's bid to
formulate a P2P Bill of Rights outlining the rights and responsibilities customers using P2P services on its
network would be subject to.

If it sounds like a bid to slot some more terms and
conditions into a customer's contract, that's exactly how internet user
advocacy groups in the US
are seeing it.

You'll remember that Comcast, after throttling peer-to-peer
traffic on its network for years, came to an agreement with BitTorrent to alter
its network traffic management activities to improve the performance of
Bittorrent for Comcast users. Now Comcast and P2P software maker Pando want to
meet with ISPs in the US
to set down some rules governing use of P2P services.

The P2P Bill of Rights, which Comcast hopes to have
published later this year, sounds like a nightmare for the consumer. What if
P2P functionality changes or customer needs change? Unlike the subject of the
better-known Bill of Rights (1791) the Americans hold so dear, the needs of
internet users are constantly shifting. Rules of use can't be encapsulated in
something as overarching as a Bill of Rights.

What Comcast should do is carry out the planned work with
Pando to move to a protocol-agnostic network management policy as soon
as possible and show its customers its serious about giving them fair access to
the internet services they want to use. In essence, the ISP should be striving
for net neutrality in its own domain and that should be a fundamental part of
its service offering, enshrined in its legally binding terms and conditions.

VoIP on the iPhone

Israeli company Fring seems to be getting a lot of attention
for its VoIP client for jail-broken iPhones.

Here's Wired's take on the new software.
The interesting thing is that it integrates with - Skype, Google Talk, MSN
Messenger, ICQ and SIP (for voice and chat) plus Twitter, Yahoo and AIM (chat
only).

That's a good range of popular services, though not all of
them seem to work totally successfully yet. Still, I'll definitely be giving
Fring a go on my iPhone. Has anyone tried it out here in New Zealand,
either on an iPhone or other type of handset?