By Mark Memmott

"A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks," the Associated Press reports.

The wire service says that "Tuesday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC's authority to impose so called 'net neutrality' obligations. It marks a serious setback for the FCC, which needs authority to regulate the Internet in order to push ahead with key parts of its
massive national broadband plan."

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, has made the case that the Web should be accessible to everyone on the same terms with no legal content blocked.

Update at 11:35 a.m. ET. The AP now adds that:

"The court case centered on Comcast's challenge of a 2008 FCC order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. The commission, at the time headed by Republican Kevin Martin, based its order on a set of net-neutrality principles it adopted in 2005 to prevent broadband providers from becoming online gatekeepers. Those principles have guided the FCC's enforcement of communications laws on a case-by-case basis, and now Genachowski is trying to formalize those rules."

categories: Legal, Technology

10:46 - April 6, 2010

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