US regulators have dropped the net neutrality bomb on Comcast, the country’s largest cable operator that supplies broadband service to14.4m households. The Federal Communications Commission ruled in August that the firm had secretly throttled certain “peer-to-peer” applications, such as Bit Torrent, that gobble bandwidth.

The motive for the scheme, said the FCC, was not to optimise spectrum sharing but to “unduly squelch” an “open and accessible internet,” excluding products competing with Comcast’s own video-on-demand (VOD). Finding the cable operator a bad actor, it ordered the company to abandon its existing practices and to better disclose its network management methods to customers.