After Comcast's run-in with the FCC over their throttling of upstream P2P traffic, consumer advocates would have you believe a major battle was won and we've entered a new phase of ISPs being completely transparent about how and when they manage network traffic. The reality is that even ISPs that do exactly what Comcast got slammed for doing (TCP packet forgery, like Cox) can apparently get away with continuing the practice -- as long as they include nebulous language in their acceptable use policies.

That's exemplified by the launch of Sprint's new XOHM service today. Consumer advocates are angry that XOHM's acceptable use policy gives Sprint the right to "use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing." Consumer advocacy group the Free Press this afternoon released a press release saying they were "troubled" by the company's vague AUP:The fact is, the FCC's attack on Comcast's traffic management practices was limited in scope, with the agency perfectly happy to ignore similar practices across both terrestrial and wireless broadband carriers. It's not even clear that the FCC will win a legal battle with Comcast over whether the FCC's network neutrality principles apply to landline networks. These principles don't apply to wireless networks (no matter how much Skype wishes it were so).

One example of how being painfully vague remains in fashion: T-Mobile launched the first Android-based phone last week with the quiet stipulation that you couldn't download more than 1GB per month, or you'd be throttled to 50kbps. When the press began pointing out how idiotic this was for a next-generation "broadband" phone, T-Mobile simply changed the service TOS to be incredibly vague while leaving themselves with the right to do whatever they like, whenever they like. This is the new golden age of transparency?

Should Sprint be forced to be completely transparent about how they're throttling P2P on the new XOHM network? Who exactly has the authority to police them? Was the FCC's Comcast investigation really a win for consumers if vague legalese is the rule of thumb for network management? Is how and when an ISP throttles traffic more about truth-in-advertising than network neutrality anyway?