The US Court Of Appeals For The District Of Columbia has ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to enforce network neutrality rules for broadband internet providers.
The ruling came in Comcast’s appeal of the that agency’s 2008 ruling on the cable giant’s practice of throttling P2P traffic.
Although the court’s decision means the FCC doesn’t have the authority to punish Comcast for their “network management” practices, their legal problems aren’t over yet. In fact it clears the way for lawsuits pending in federal court which have been held up by the question of FCC jurisdiction.
There’s also the potential for action by the Federal Trade Commission over alleged false advertising of their service.
What makes things more complicated is that the FCC may still be able to establish jurisdiction over net neutrality by revisiting a 2002 ruling on the nature of internet service. At that time it was determined that broadband internet was merely an information service, and therefore not subject to the same level of regulation as common carrier service like traditional phone lines.
Result for: net neutrality
According to the Associated Press it seems that Comcast is not the only company guilty of throttling P2P traffic, Singapore’s StarHub, and Cox Communications were equal offenders as well.
Comcast has been seen as the main offender for the last few months and saw backlash from net neutrality advocates, customers and the even the FCC. The AP however, says that a worldwide study of 8,175 Internet users, showed that 3 companies were indeed blocking the traffic, and that Cox was likely the worst offender.
Of the 151 Cox subscribers, 82 had their transfers blocked, read the survey. The Cox interference however, was different than that of Comcast. Cox only blocked seeding of a file downloaded through BitTorrent, thus reducing the amount of people the downloader can share the file with.
Cox’s subscriber agreement does state that subscribers are signing up for “protocol filtering,” meaning that the company “prioritizes some forms of Internet traffic over others,” but spokespeople have said that BitTorrent is not particularly discriminated against.
