Federal Appeals Court Strikes Major Blow Against Net Neutrality, Major Blow For Economic Freedom

The U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. today hand a major defeat to the Net Neutrality crowd:

WASHINGTON (AP) – 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.

Tuesday’s ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for the Comcast Corporation, the nation’s largest cable company. It had challenged the F.C.C.’s authority to impose so called “net neutrality” obligations.

The ruling marks a serious setback for the F.C.C., which is trying to officially set net neutrality regulations. The agency chairman Julius Genachowski argues that such rules are needed to prevent phone and cable companies from using their control over Internet access to favor some online content and services over others.

The decision also has implications for the massive national broadband plan released by the F.C.C. last month. The agency needs clear authority to regulate broadband in order to push ahead with some its key recommendations, including a proposal to expand broadband by tapping the federal fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities.

The court case centered on Comcast’s challenge of a 2008 F.C.C. order banning the company from blocking its broadband subscribers from using an online file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent.

Melissa Clouthier over at Liberty Pundits sums up quite nicely what this really means:

Basically this means that a company can do business the way it wants to. What different internet providers have been worried about is having the “information spigot” turned off for them. That is, a user or provider who uses huge amounts of bandwidth could be denied, and that could kill business.

So companies like Google and other big providers wanted the courts to say that the FCC could control this and guarantee that everyone has as much bandwidth as they want.

But the court ruled that a company like Comcast has every right to decide what data it carries.

That is exactly how it should be.

In the case that was before the Court, Comcast had made the business decision that Bit Torrent users were utilizing an undue amount of a limited asset bandwidth. The company has implemented a number of measures to safeguard its network from those who know the definition of torrenting and a lot more. This may allow the majority of its users to do things like check their email without having to worry about the network going down because some 21-year-old is using Bit Torrent to download a bootleg copy of Avatar.

It’s Comcast’s network, they should have the right to decide how it’s used and to take action to protect its property and its other customers.

The Court got this one right.

Here’s the 36 page unanimous opinion:

Comcast v. Federal Communications Commission