It's just not nice

After a quiet vote, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to sanction Comcast for throttling broadband customers' access to peer to peer sites.

In a detailed article about P2P filesharing and the increasingly-clogged state of the internet, Robert McDowell of the Washington Post wrote:

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems … If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions … As an institution, the FCC is incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds that make up Internet time.

But as MediaPost observes, 'net neutrality advocates generally laud the FCC's attempts to enforce fair internet use — as long as it errs on the side of open broadband. Two weeks ago, FCC chair Kevin Martin proposed that Comcast cease its traffic-throttling practices and disclose network management plans to subscribers.

"This order would send a strong signal to the marketplace that arbitrarily interfering with users' online choices is not acceptable," said general counsel Marvin Ammori of the Free Press.