Lord of the File Sharing: FCC vs. Comcast – One Net Neutrality to Rule Them All! (hopefully)

On April 6th a U.S. appeals court ruled that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did not have authority to order that Comcast cease throttling peer-to-peer traffic for network usage control.

To put it simply, this basically means that according to the court ruling, Comcast was simply directing available bandwidth in ways that they felt were effective for their network management.  This was the claim by Comcast defense. The U.S. courts agreed that the FCC can not tell Comcast how to manage said network utilization.

Herein lies the problem.  With the lack of control the FCC has over broadband regulation, unlike the telephone industry, neutral usage can not be controlled by a “third party” regulator like the FCC currently. Instead bandwidth will be manipulated by individual ISP’s who can “throttle down” individual customer usage for any reason they choose, including lessening speed throughput on content that competes with their own services, such as Hulu, video games, movie downloading, etc.

         The following is a mash up of reports on the FCC vs. Comcast court ruling from around the web:

The Washinton Post stated:

“At first glance, Tuesday’s federal court ruling on Comcastlooked like a clean win for the cable giant and for competitors including Time Warner and AT&T. The court, after all, ruled that Comcast could regulate high-speed Internet traffic over its own system and that a company that wanted to push its content through Comcast’s pipelines could not.

But the ruling might be only the beginning of a long campaign between Internet service providers and companies such as Skype, Google and Microsoft. The outcome is far from certain.

But the FCC could work around the Tuesday ruling with a vote of the five FCC commissioners. Currently, Internet service providers fall under a lightly regulated area of the FCC. It would take only a 3-to-2 vote to move high-speed Internet into one of the FCC’s more heavily regulated areas, where the agency could set tough rules on companies such as Comcast.

The FCC said Wednesday that the ruling would hamper key portions of its national broadband plan, such as its goal to bring high-speed connections to rural and low-income areas.”
Broadcast Engineering mentioned:

Hours after the decision was made public some advocates of Net Neutrality began calling for a reclassification of Internet access service. “The FCC should immediately start a proceeding bringing Internet access service back under some common carrier regulation similar to that used for decades,” said Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C. based public interest group, in a statement posted on the group’s Web site.

Yahoo wrote:

“With so much at stake, the FCC now has several options. It could ask Congress to give it explicit authority to regulate broadband. Or it could appeal Tuesday’s decision.

But both of those steps could take too long because the agency “has too many important things they have to do right away,” said Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press. Free Press was among the groups that alerted the FCC after The Associated Press ran tests and reported that Comcast was interfering with attempts by some subscribers to share files online.

Scott believes that the likeliest step by the FCC is that it will simply reclassify broadband as a more heavily regulated telecommunications service. That, ironically, could be the worst-case outcome from the perspective of the phone and cable companies.

“Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order,” Scott said. “And they sliced right through the FCC’s arm and plunged the ax into their own back.”

The battle over the FCC’s legal jurisdiction comes amid a larger policy dispute over the merits of net neutrality. Backed by Internet companies such as Google Inc. and the online calling service Skype, the FCC says rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from prioritizing some traffic or degrading or services that compete with their core businesses. Indeed, BitTorrent can be used to transfer large files such as online video, which could threaten Comcast’s cable TV business.”

And Kotaku stated:

“Now as gamers, we could live without BitTorrent, though some publishers make extensive use of torrent files to deliver content patches for PC games. There are plenty of other ways to deliver patches that a ban on torrents wouldn’t cripple a gamer.

It’s the potential restrictions that could come down the line that are more frightening.

Net neutrality, again, calls for no discrimination between data or the devices that connect to that data. With today’s game consoles easily identifiable via network, what’s to stop a broadband provider from claiming that too much traffic is being used by your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and demand you pay a premium to connect them to the web?

Or massively-multiplayer online games, for that matter. Millions of people play World of Warcraft in the United States alone. What happens when an ISP decides that World of Warcraft players need to pay a little extra for the constant connection to the game?

It may sound ridiculous to some, but there are already restrictions in place. Comcast now restricts its standard users to 250GB of bandwidth a month. While that’s not a problem right now for most gamers, PC games are getting larger every day, and consoles are already starting to allow users to download full games directly to their hard drive. If a company like Comcast were to suddenly start breaking that 250GB into segments based on use, we could be in trouble.”

It is clear that this battle has just begun.  What’s at risk?  The internet’s soul!  (Dramatic dun-dun-dun…..)

Image courtesy Gadget Boyo