Court Favors Comcast in F.C.C. ‘Net Neutrality’ Ruling – NYTimes.com

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down a recent FCC regulation that would’ve forced Internet providers to treat all Internet traffic, including spam and hacking activities, the same. The court mentioned in its decision the fact that “the allowance of wide latitude in the exercise of delegated powers [by the FCC] is not the equivalent of untrammeled freedom to regulate activities over which the statute fails to confer . . . Commission authority.”

The Obama adminsitration has made Net Neturality one of its central technology policy issues. It has embraced Lawrence Lessig (Future of Ideas) and Jonathan Zittrain’s (The Future of the Internet ) perspective that the Internet needs to be treated as a type of commons. More specifically, the Internet should be treated as a “must carry” pipeline, with no specific standards or norms for privileging some content at the expese of other. This means that Comcast should not slow down the delivery of YouTube clips (owned by Google in favor of Hulu movies (owned in part by NBC, which Comcast is trying to buy). It also means that Comcast cannot slow down the traffic or prevent the download of illegal movies of some known hackers and pirates.

Following this policy line, the FCC has issued regulations that made net neutrality an official legal provision. To its surprise, a federal court struck down the regulation, finding it too intrusive and limiting. Regulation cannot intrude upon the way in which business decide to organize their shop.

The Obama administration will for sure pursue this matter further, either by mobilizing the Congress to pass a formal net neturality law, or by appealing the decision to the Supreme Court. It is  the beginning of a long and painful process, which will test again the limits of regulating media institutions.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

The decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, specifically concerned the efforts of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, to slow down customers’ access to a service called BitTorrent, which is used to exchange large video files, most often pirated copies of movies.

via Court Favors Comcast in F.C.C. ‘Net Neutrality’ Ruling – NYTimes.com.

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