Comcast to Pay $16 million for BitTorrent Throttling

Comcast, the ISP that gained a bad rap when last year it was accused a number of times of interfering with the traffic of p2p users and pledged good behavior in January 2009, settled its class-action lawsuit yesterday. The company agreed to pay $16 million (minus $3 million in fees) damage compensation to those customers who had their bandwidth throttled.

Comcast’s statement came shortly after: "We are pleased to have reached a settlement in these consolidated class action lawsuits. Although we continue to believe that our network management practices were appropriate and in the best interests of our customers, we prefer to put this matter behind us and avoid a potentially lengthy and distracting legal dispute that would serve no useful purpose."

I know $16 million sounds like a lot of money but if I tell that means each Comcast customer will only be compensated around $16 the feeling tends to fade.

However, if you a want a claim to that $16 then you must have used these software or services – Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella – between April 1, 2006 and December 31, 2008.