Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting other players squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.

But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popular Bittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.

Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.

When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.

So Apple announced a $200 rollback on iPhone prices…. TWO DAYS after my return policy expired. I am so livid; more than I’ve ever been at a technology company (even Microsoft). I pay $599 for an iPhone a couple weeks ago, and then they announce a 33% reduction in price. I won’t say I’ll never buy anything from Apple again, because I *certainly* will. No doubt. Their stuff is the best, the one, the only… which makes this a million times worse for me. Please Apple, don’t let us, your die hard fans and best evangelists start to hate you… send us gift cards, iTunes songs… anything. If you dropped the price $20 a month for 10 months, fine. But this, this is purely a slap in the face.

UPDATE: I feel slightly better after learning that I’ll get a $100 credit to the Apple Store. I mean, yeah, I’d rather have cash, and I’d rather get all $200 back than just $100 of it. But it’s better than nothing.