Three short pieces about the latest Net Neutrality struggle — Comcast limiting bandwidth and the FTC says no — where will it go?
August 20, 2008, the FCC ruled that Comcast’s network management practices that specifically targeted BitTorrent users, were unfair. The ruling is a small victory for Net Neutrality, but it wont stop ISPs from going after the heavy bandwidth users, not at all. Comcast was ordered to stop slowing down BitTorrent users before the end of the year. In addition, the company has to disclose all “network managing” practices.
Bad News for Comcast: FCC Wants Network Management Info
This all is part and parcel of Net neutrality, the umbrella term for the debate over the degree to which a carrier is entitled to control content on its network. The saga of Comcast and, by extension, all big ISPs, against the FCC and/or bandwidth hogs continues. The latest twists, reported by IT Business Edge and elsewhere, are that Comcast will limit bandwidth for people it deems to have used too much for periods of 10 to 20 minutes and that the FCC has ordered the company to detail its network management practices and describe how they would be changed by year’s end.
Carl Weinschenk for IT Business Edge – Louisville, KY, USA
The FCC Memorandum Opinion and Order : FCC-08-183A1.pdf
The FCC mangles a net neutrality decision
Jan Dawson writes for ovum.com telecom and software news:
The US Federal Communications Commission finally released on Wednesday its full decision on a recent case involving cable operator Comcast’s blocking of peer-to-peer traffic. But it failed to act in a way that would provide clarity for other operators going forward and left itself open to legal challenges. It could – and should – have done much better.
In reaching a decision on how to respond, the Commission faced a problem: the 2005 policy statement does not have the force of law, since it was only a statement of policy and not a rulemaking or order. As such, even though the principles were honourable, they could not be enforced, a view shared by the two dissenting Commissioners on the five-person panel.
