Platform responsibility? Get the backstory - check my book The Closing of the Net - only £15.99!
EU policy-makers should take note as they contemplate the Telecoms Package and 'degradation of service'
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which oversees telecoms regulation in America, has officially sanctioned the Internet provider Comcast for throttling traffic. Comcast was accused of 'throttling' - that is, slowing down - its users' connections every time they attempted to download video files from the BitTorrent website. Bit Torrent is the company behind the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology of the same name, only in America, it operates a licenced service.
The FCC determined that Comcast "unlawfully" disruputed the transfer of video files, thereby violating an important principle of the Internet, namely the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet and that broadband networks should be widely available, open, afforedable and accessible to all. The decision sets a legal precedent for cases where ISPs are accused of throttling. For European policy-makers and law-makers, it represents a landmark case against the current political will to go along with content industry requests for filtering equipment to be installed.
For the full story, see TelecomTV.
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In 2012, I presented my PhD research in the European Parliament.
Iptegrity.com is the website of Dr Monica Horten. She is a policy analyst specialising in Internet governance & European policy, including platform accountability. She is a published author & Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics & Political Science. She served as an independent expert on the Council of Europe Committee on Internet Freedom. She has worked on CoE, EU and UNDP funded projects in eastern Europe and the Caucasus. In a voluntary capacity, she has led UK citizen delegations to the European Parliament. She was shortlisted for The Guardian Open Internet Poll 2012.
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