Its been a while now since word got out that Comcast for sure and possibly other large ISPs were filtering and throttling traffic to their customers. Now Steve Musil over on C/Net is reporting on a report in the Register that Google will be releasing tools that they have developed which will allow users to monitor and identify this type of filtering by your broadband carrier. I am far from a Google fan boy, but I have to give Google a pat on the back for this one. 

The ISPs have tried to stop the government from stepping in here and preventing them from limiting and filtering traffic like this. It is part of the whole net neutrality thing.  The ISPs response is the government doesn't have to step in, the market will take care of itself. Yeah, just like the oil companies say about the price of gas. 

Ultimately I think the ISPs know they are going to lose this fight. Their next play is to start charging you based upon how much bandwidth you use.  We have already seen the noise around that one. It reminds me of my web hosting days.  Some hosts charged you by the bandwidth you used per month. Others gave you unlimited bandwidth but put you on a crowded machine where you had to fight for CPU time and hooked that up to a small pipe that was saturated.  So you did not pay for extra bandwidth, but you couldn't use any either.  Bottom line after a long period of access being cheap and plentiful, the ISP game is back.  You can pay them now or pay them later, but you will pay them.