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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