January 10, 2008 at 3:25 am · Authored by Ricky · Filed under Operators

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin seems to be on the warpath, and has announced recently that he will be investigating Comcast’s idea last year to throttle its users’ usage of popular file-sharing protocols like torrents. It turns out that a bunch of consumer groups filed a complaint, asking the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 per subscriber. Mashable’s Mark Hopkins checked things out and discovered that Comcast has 9.1 million subscribers. Multiply it out and you’ve got $1.77 TRILLION.

It’s important to see how this goes down, as mobile phones networks are getting faster and faster, and phones are getting more and more capable, operators are going to be interested in ways to offer tiered data packages. Hopefully the FCC will make sure it’s well known that operators are not allowed to throttle specific types of usage.