SALON– The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled today [PDF] that the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t have the authority to enforce “net neutrality,” which requires companies to treat all traffic over their networks equally.

The case was brought by Comcast. A little history: the initial case started in 2007, when Comcast customers noticed the company was “throttling,” or slowing/stopping, peer-to-peer network sharing. (Peer-to-peer network sharing has many legitimate uses, but it is most known, of late, for being the way that BitTorrent and other media downloading apparatuses make illegal sharing of copyrighted materials possible).

Why would Comcast care if people were sharing files? For a couple of reasons. Shared media files are often large (think: movie downloads) and take up a lot of bandwidth. Also, Comcast, being a cable company, is in the business of charging people to watch movies and television shows; if people are able to access those programs for free, it loses money. Beyond all of that, Comcast could afford to make P2P sharers angry — in many places, your choice for fast Internet service is Comcast or no one. The fact that Comcast could do this under a thin veil of claiming to be stopping media piracy was just the icing on the cake. The choice to throttle made all kinds of business sense.

Customers, however, were not happy, and two groups filed complaints with the FCC. The FCC told Comcast, “Hey, not cool,” saying the throttling violated the FCC’s “Internet Policy Statement,” which holds that “consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.” Because that rule already existed, the FCC said it didn’t even need to issue new rules to handle this problem and could, instead, just tell Comcast to knock it off. Comcast agreed. They’d already changed the way they were doing things, so the FCC just made them publish those changes for customers, and said, essentially, if you do this again, we’re gonna make a rule.

Is everyone happy? No. Enter the court challenge. Comcast played along, but it also saw an opening to challenge this FCC ruling. It did so on three points: that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to intervene in how Comcast (and other companies) manage their networks; that the FCC has no real power to adjudicate disputes (that it can only solve problems by issuing rules, not by choosing sides); and that the initial order was “so poorly reasoned as to be arbitrary and capricious.”

Continue reading about the New Ruling about Net Neutrality.

Photo by flickr user Adrienne Serra

© COPYRIGHT SALON, 2010