NBC Universal's comments re: Broadband Industry Practices, which detail the amount of illegal file sharing that is facilitated by P2P applications.

The record compiled in this proceeding confirms that fewer than five percent of Internet users consume at least 60 to 70 percent of broadband network capacity through peer-to-peer file-sharing and that some 90 percent of this traffic consists of illegal, pirated content. The resulting network congestion seriously impairs the ability of the remaining 95 percent of law-abiding subscribers to access the Internet for such routine, bandwidth-friendly tasks as email, web-browsing and legal downloading of music and video files. In short, ordinary, mainstream consumers, to their real detriment, are forced to facilitate and subsidize the illegal acts of a very small fraction of Internet users.

Network operators are right to employ reasonable network management tools that help to alleviate the congestion caused by a few so that all subscribers are able to benefit from their access to the Internet. The Commission should not hamper network operators’ ability to do so by imposing static, one-size-fits-all rules.

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