FCC‘s Authority in Comcast Case Questioned

Last week we informed you about a turn of events in the dispute between the FCC and Comcast, (which in December agreed to pay $16 million damage compensation to the customers it had throttled their bandwidth) with the latter challenging the FCC’s right to investigate if BitTorrent traffic was blocked on the network.

According to RttNews, Saturday U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday questioned the Federal Communications Commission or FCC's authority to penalize Comcast Corp for interfering with p2p (peer-to-peer) traffic.

Comcast claims there are no rules the FCC acted in keeping with and Helgi Walker, an attorney of the ISP, said that since the company has already pledged to adopt new network management practices in accordance with the FCC requirements the judges should vacate the FCC order.

“In 2005, the commission had adopted net-neutrality principles to prevent internet service providers or ISPs from selectively blocking or slowing certain web content. These principles require the broadband providers to treat all the data flowing over their networks with no discrimination,” but while many like Google Inc. support them, to others they represent a threat to their billions of dollars business.

Stay tuned.