A Little Cheese With That Whine, Comcast?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 4, 2008 at 4:30 PM PT
As predictable as day following night, litigation has followed the Federal Communication Commission’s sanctions against Comcast. In a long-expected action, Comcast sued the commission today, claiming the FCC had no legal grounds on which to punish it for throttling file-sharing traffic on its network, as David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, explained in a statement:
We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the Commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules. We continue to recognize that the Commission has jurisdiction over Internet service providers and may regulate them in appropriate circumstances and in accordance with appropriate procedures. However, we are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission’s action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record.”
As legally inappropriate and unjustifiable as Comcast (CMCSA) might find it, the cable company will abide by the FCC’s order during the appeal. And it will forge ahead with plans to develop more net neutrality-friendly network management techniques by the end of the year. Said Cohen, “We will follow through on our longstanding commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year. We also remain committed to bringing our customers a superior Internet experience.”
Superior Internet experience until you hit that 250GB broadband cap, that is.
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Comments
Comcast made a big mistake when it started to regulate its network without telling customers. Why didn’t it try to capitalize on heavy users and create more expensive tiers for them? Think of it like this: Would a restaurant purposefully give smaller portions to an overweight customer?
Posted by Ken Okel at September 5th, 2008 at 6:18 amI don’t quite understand the law. How can Comcast or any other telecom company (like ATT esp) do these sorts of things including deep packet inspection, protocol banning, fishing for child porn, etc- without losing its Common Carrier Status????
Posted by Jethro Tull at September 5th, 2008 at 2:12 pm