Staff Blog
The day the Internet died: Court rules that F.C.C. can’t enforce “net neutrality”
OMG Kabletown is about all we can say right now to this terrible news:
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.
Check out the New York Times piece on the ruling for the rest of the scoop.
This is a fairly narrow decision regarding the FCC’s inability to enforce “net neutrality.” The problem here is Congress, not the courts. Clueless federal lawmakers are being lobbied heavily by old media, and there’s very little public outcry beyond the usual cyber-activist groups. What’s despicable is Comcast’s ability to market “unlimited” broadband services and then secretly throttle down bittorrent users because they presume the service is used for illegal downloading.
Time-Warner is doing it, too. You’ll see that your on-demand Netflix and Hulu will not work as good.
Time Warner will tell you to go to speakeasy.net to check your speed, which will be really good; but then, they’ve opened up that channel. Why doesn’t this compare at all to the cnet speed check?
[...] you pay for their movies then have you stream them online, even from legal sites like Hulu. Brings that whole net neutrality business into a whole different light, don’t [...]