Companies like Comcast have been in the news quite a bit lately, admitting to tampering with peer to peer transfers that cross their network. If I can dig up the reference, I seem to remember reading that one major ISP was drastically wrong about how much p2p transferring was actually happening on their network. The father of packet data networks is now selling a device designed to detect and throttle peer to peer "flows".
This all seems to be a bit of an arms race. If one or more ISPs are throttling connections behind the scenes, just making more connections seems like it would be a decent solution. If bittorrent clients (for example) were to start making active connections with an order of magnitude more peers (very little more work at a peer level), I could easily imagine overwhelming the ability of a given piece of throttling hardware to track the connections. Or, if people were really serious about disliking their ISP capriciously throttling their traffic, it would not be terribly difficult to create a torrent-like client that just transferred hundreds of small junk files, expressly to overwhelm the throttling hardware.
I don't really have a point, here. I'm mostly just thinking out loud.
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