This morning, as I write, the US House of Representatives is conducting a hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act. Senate version of the bill is PROTECT IP. Either bill would dramatically change how Americans use the Internet, by granting power to shut down sites for many reasons -- in the case of SOPA simply for linking to another site or content that may be pirated.

I'll probably write a commentary about the bills, which their critics claim will undermine free speech that made the World Wide Web an enabler of communications, commerce and transparency. Many opponents of both bills express greater concern about the House version, SOPA, which was introduced in late October. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Senate version, PROTECT IP, in May. The bills' motivations are simple: To extend copyright protections to the Internet.

But it's going to be slow going, and for good reasons. Despite all IPv6 promises, there is still much, much testing to do before it's ready for prime time.

Today Comcast revealed that it has started an IPv6 "pilot market deployment" as first step leading to nationwide rollout next year. Broadband providers like Comcast haven't rushed the switch to IPv6 -- despite an increasing shortage of IPv4 network addresses -- because of lacking support, ranging from operating systems to network switches and other devices. Then there are security questions that only real-time use can answer.

Comcast is still throttling peer-to-peer traffic, but on a much smaller scale. Data provided by traffic analytics firm Measurement Lab and compiled by Syracuse University researchers this week provides verification of that.

While Comcast was slowing down half of BitTorrent traffic across its network in the second quarter 2008, it had decreased throttling efforts to about three percent of all BitTorrent packets by the end of the first quarter of 2010.