We've certainly levied more than our fair share of criticism at Comcast over the years, but late yesterday the cable giant took one hell of a beating for doing, well, absolutely nothing. It began when Slashdot posted a story saying that Comcast had imposed a new throttling system. Comcast actually hadn't -- the story Slashdot linked to was nearly a year old and explored a throttling system Comcast implemented almost a year ago.

No matter, apparently. Neither Slashdot or its readers noticed. Neither did other blogs. The blog entry was quickly picked up by Engadget, whose commenters unleashed a wave of vitriol at the cable company that would make a Marine with Tourette syndrome blush. "Get bent Comcast!" yelled one user. "I think everyone in America should get to crap on the CEO of Comcast's head!" charmingly opined a reader. "What a horrible company," decried another. "I will be canceling you ASAP!" insisted one Comcast customer.

It's ironic, given that last customer has actually been living under Comcast's new throttling system for more than a year and hadn't noticed (which is a good thing). As we explored in detail back in September of 2008, the system only temporarily throttles very heavy users on particularly congested nodes. This system, launched in January of 2009, replaced Comcast's old tactic of using forged TCP packets to throttle upstream P2P traffic for all users, all the time. The new system is actually an improvement, but Comcast's beating yesterday continued.

Electronista joined in, posting a story proclaiming Comcast's throttling as new. They amusingly linked to the Inquirer without giving Slashdot any finder's credit, or noticing the story's ripeness. Pretty soon even our forums started to fill up with posts from confused Comcast users (1, 2) suddenly outraged by a year old change. At this point, entire legions of Internet users were outraged by -- a twelve month old improvement.

To refresh for those who apparently haven't been paying attention: Comcast's old network management techniques included booting users off the network for excessive consumption without defining "excessive," and forging TCP packets to screw up everybody's upstream connections. Comcast's new throttling system was implemented in January of 2009 and combines a clear 250GB month cap with a throttling system that only temporarily targets heavy users on congested nodes. Not everybody likes it, but it's a step forward.

Those improvements were only made possible after consumers and consumer advocates spent the better part of a decade trying to get Comcast to be more transparent about their capping and throttling practices. Slamming them for taking a step in the right direction because you (be a consumer or date-stamp-challenged blogger) couldn't be bothered to pay attention is obnoxiously counter-productive.