As noted last week, the FCC’s decision to sanction Comcast for packet forgery and P2P throttling is a little empty, given it it creates no new guidelines, doesn’t really ask the cable company to do anything they weren’t already voluntarily doing, and probably won’t stand up to legal assault anyway. One thing the FCC ruling did accomplish (even if the industry doesn’t know it yet) was shift the network neutrality discussion from throttling to caps and metered billing.

Almost on cue, Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol and now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, chimes in on the FCC decision and metered billing in a Google blog post. Cerf applauds Comcast’s shift to a “protocol agnostic” solution, and says he’s been pleased by the “tone and substance” of his conversation with Comcast engineers concerning their decision to only throttle the heaviest users (for a change). But after linking to Broadband Reports, he notes he’s not much of a fan of caps or metered usage:

Reading Cerf’s piece, it’s not clear whether he’s aware that in addition to Comcast’s new, more tailored throttling, they’re also considering 250GB caps and overage fees.
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