Peoria Pundit

Good news on the Net Neutrality front:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of “file sharing” software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said Comcast has “arbitrarily” blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

[snip]

Ben Scott, federal policy chief for Free Press said Thursday night the FCC’s action may have consequences for other Internet providers going forward.

“This is going to be a bellwether,” he said.

Martin, a Republican, will likely get support from the two Democrats on the commission, who are both proponents of the network neutrality concept. Those three votes would be enough for a majority on the five-member commission.

Comcast serves the Peoria area since its takeover of Insight, a truly wonderful little company with decent technical support and which DIDN’T slow down access to sites of potential competitors.

This entry was posted on July 11, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under On the Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.